And So it Goes Quotes

“Vonnegut’s choice of investments outwardly contradicts his public remarks about human beings’ corrosive impact on the environment—“I think the earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us.… we are a disease on the face of this planet.”72 But his taking a seat at the high-stakes tables of capitalism as an investor isn’t inconsistent at all. He believed in free enterprise. It had made his forebearers rich. And he recognized that many ideas of Western freedom are intrinsically tied to capitalism. What he objected to was capitalist ideology, combined with Christian pieties, to justify the power of the rich over the poor.”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“DESPITE THE quiet in his apartment, however, and Edie’s salutary presence, he couldn’t get anywhere on Breakfast of Champions. Many of the pages had been discarded from the manuscript of Slaughterhouse-Five, and he was trying to salvage them. Even so, Vonnegut thought his new novel was so asinine it embarrassed him.150”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“KURT WAS nearly fifty years old when a generation of young readers found him. “I certainly didn’t go after the youth market or anything like that,” he said. “I didn’t have my fingers on any pulse; I was simply writing.”6 But he did have a theory about his appeal. It was because he addressed “sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled”: whether there is a God, for instance, what the good life consists of, whether we should expect a reward for moral behavior.7 It didn’t faze him that these and similar questions had already been addressed innumerable times by philosophers from Boethius to Camus. His purpose for draping ethical questions in humorous costumes was to “catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.”8 And who”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Jim Adams, Kurt’s nephew, found “there was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Kurt must be from the tone of his books, the kind of guy who would say, ‘God damn it, you got to be kind,’ and the reality of his behavior on a daily basis. He was a complicated, difficult man.… I think he admired the idea of love, community, and family from a distance, but couldn’t deal with the complicated emotional elements they included.”142”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Some students, he realized, were in the workshop primarily to avoid being drafted, and not because of an overwhelming desire to write. Quietly, he let it be known that he didn’t care whether the young men in his classes submitted anything; he wouldn’t flunk them, which could result in losing their student deferment and making them eligible for the draft.133”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“For twenty years, he had been strangely confounded about the book, and intellectualizing its problems hadn’t helped. At base, the antagonist was death, and life forces would have to sing a stronger, more convincing counterpoint in the novel. But now, because he was experiencing sex—the psyche’s match for death—in ways that inspired him, he saw how to give the novel balance. He would introduce a fantasy lover with the titillating name Montana Wildhack, Loree’s double, to rescue Slaughterhouse-Five’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, from the terror of existing in an empty, meaningless universe. * * * AS”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Readers often remark on how Vonnegut’s humor contributes strongly to the sense of him being right there on the page. He creates this intimacy, for the first time in Cat’s Cradle, by aligning himself with the reader through talking about something that’s taboo.146 He was a practitioner of what Freud called the “tendentious joke.” This kind of humor, and Vonnegut will come to rely on it (some say too much), is obscene or hostile; it tends to be cynical, critical, and blasphemous, giving voice to a need to defy authority or air “bad thoughts.” The”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“CAT’S CRADLE appeared in 1963, after a long gestation, but the idea for it had occurred to Kurt as far back as his days at General Electric. A story often repeated at the Schenectady plant concerned H. G. Wells’s visit in the 1930s. The head scientist, Irving Langmuir, had proposed an idea to Wells for a story about a form of water that solidified at room temperature. Wells, the most famous science fiction writer of the day, expressed interest, but his novels, at their core, were parables about humanity—a scientific conundrum didn’t interest him.”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“An imaginary planet has a role like a clown in a Shakespeare play. Every so often an audience needs a breather, a fresh view. Other planets provide that. But every time I write about another planet it is deliberately so unrealistic that people can’t really believe it. In a way it makes our own planet more important, more real.”66”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Malachi Constant is one of the richest men on Earth, but otherwise he is a soulless, purposeless individual. Thinking he might learn something to his benefit, he arranges to meet Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord, a New England aristocrat, while traveling in his private spaceship with his dog, Kazak, encountered a temporal anomaly called a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum.” This wrinkle in time allows him to travel both back to the past and forward to the future. Mostly, he and Kazak (a palindromic name) appear only as a wave spiral between the sun and Betelgeuse, materializing on Earth for a short while every fifty-nine days. He prophesizes that Constant will travel to Mars and father a child with Rumfoord’s disdainful wife, Beatrice—certainly not the news Constant wishes to hear, but that is indeed what happens, no matter what else intervenes. There is no avoiding destiny. Likewise, a parallel, humorous subplot is that Earth’s history has been manipulated by extraterrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore. They need a replacement part for a stranded spaceship, and all of human endeavor has been directed toward producing a rounded metal strip with two holes in it. The greatest of humankind’s architectural and engineering achievements—Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, and the Kremlin—are really only messages in the Tralfamadorian mathematical language, informing the spaceship’s robot commander of how much longer he has to wait for the part. To underscore the universe’s ultimate determinism, Constant returns to Earth and makes a remark that he thinks is profound and original—“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”—only to find that it has already been carved on a wooden scroll.59”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“In high school, Sturgeon had been captain of his gymnastic team, and he announced that he would perform one of his best tricks. Clearing away some of the furniture in the living room, he stood with his feet together, back straight, arms outstretched, and suddenly whirled backward in a flip. But instead of landing upright, he hit the floor on his knees, shaking the whole house. Struggling to his feet, “humiliated and laughing in agony,” Kurt could tell, Sturgeon would become the model for one of Vonnegut’s best-known characters: Kilgore Trout, the wise fool of science fiction, ignored, sold only in pornographic bookstores, and half-mad with frustration.43 But Sturgeon wasn’t a fictional character—his reversals and the blows to his pride were real. And Kurt was afraid he had just witnessed a glimpse of his own future, too. “Kilgore Trout is the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become.”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Also during their honeymoon, Jane shared with him a gift from her favorite professor at Swarthmore, Henry Goddard, chair of the English Department. For every student, Goddard wrote a phrase from literature on a slip of paper, put it inside a walnut shell, and presented it at the end of the semester. For Jane, he had selected a sentence from Dostoyevsky: “One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.” Kurt referred to it for years as inspiration and solace.”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“DURING THE summer between his sophomore and junior years, Kurt worked at Vonnegut Hardware again, this time on the sales floor, discovering that the customers stole regularly, and that working where there were no windows was not for him.128 After ringing up a sale, he always added a complimentary gift to the customer’s purchase: a twelve-inch wooden ruler that doubled as an “Indiana Legal Length Fish Gauge.” Printed at the seven-inch mark was the prescient word Trout.129 But he dreaded the fate of many male Vonneguts, which was to end up with a career in the venerable hardware store or, as he characterized it to a friend, “working in the nuts and bolts department.”130”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“Franklin made a mistake, however. As the owner of the business, he assigned his nephew number two on the time clock, right under him, which was taken by the other workers as tiresome evidence of the unfairness of nepotism. Kurt was embarrassed.120 Many of the men employed by Vonnegut Hardware were making the same salary he was—fourteen dollars a week. It was his first real-life lesson in social and economic disparity, illustrating what he had read in a book recently given to him by Uncle Alex: Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. He reveled in its attacks on conspicuous consumption, “since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain some day.”121 With the excitement of a youngster who has at last caught his parents red-handed, he realized he was being raised to become bourgeois. *”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut

“He was a boring bully. Never hit me, but he would talk and talk about science until my sister and I were bored shitless.”54”
― Charles J. Shields, And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut