Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Newton was advised by those who were his nominal supervisors to take time out from the hard truths of science to brush up on theology. I like to think they did this not because they were foolish, but to remind him of how comforting and encouraging the make-believe of religion can be for common folk.

“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”

It may be, too, that we wanted to escape the powerful pull, not of gravity, which is everywhere, but of Crown Hill Cemetery.

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

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.

“Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”

I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.

Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth’s performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was “the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.”

You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.

I asked him for a definition of a Gothic novel. He said, “A young woman goes into an old house and gets her pants scared off.”