Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.

When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it.

He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: "I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down." Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. "Why?" I asked him. "If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'--you would have a very great book." "Do you know the answer?" I said. "No," he said, "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it." "Any guesses?" I said. "No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who volunteered."He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me: "There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music--sometimes the best." "That's interesting," I said. "There was no music by Jews," he said. "That was forbidden." "Naturally," I said. "And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements." "Very modern," I said. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. "There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando." "Oh?" I said. "Leichentärger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse."In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. "After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

...Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.So it goes.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can__ be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before__n Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

What is the secret of life?_ I asked.__ forget,_ said Sandra.__rotein,_ the bartender declared. __hey found something out about protein.___eah,_ said Sandra, __hat__ it.

He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,' the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. 'Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?''I missed that,' I murmured. ' I saw that,' said Sandra. 'About two days ago.''That's right,' said the bartender.'What is the secret of life?' I asked.'I forget,' said Sandra.'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found out something about protein.''Yeah,' said Sandra, 'that's it.

The doctors agreed: He was going crazy...they didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver fromunder his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was tomake holes in human beings. It looked like this:In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at hislocal hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the peoplecaught in between.Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and thepeople usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop"or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes theywouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a holein him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would puta hole in her. And so on.In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boyput holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad reportcard he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity,which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish thedifference between right and wrong.· Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairlyfamous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly tosomeplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flewthe airplane to someplace else.

... the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the newgovernment owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, evenafter slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and theirdescendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?''Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.