Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

“Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”

“If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in. Let that be my epitaph.

But I still like what O’Hare and I said to German soldiers right after we were liberated: That America was going to become more socialist, was going to try harder to give everybody work to do, and to ensure that our children, at least, weren’t hungry or cold or illiterate or scared to death.

I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.

“Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.

What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently. Many members of my generation are disappointed.