Say it ain't so...

New York Times

Published: April 11, 2007

“Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.”

Somewhere buried in a box or collecting dust on a shelf is my copy of Slaughter House Five. I don't think I've touched it since I bought it at Chapters, or maybe Indigo in high school. I remember loving it, though right now I barely remember the plot. It was my first introduction to "counter-culture." To literature that wasn't on the Aldershot High School reading list.

After I read it, I went to Burlington's best (and maybe only!) used bookstore. I remember asking the store owner if he had any of Vonnegut's other novels. I walked away with Mother Night and Cat's Cradle, two more that I haven't touched in a number of years.

Living in residence, during my first year of university, I borrowed Jack's copy of Breakfast of Champions. I read the first few sections, but with school, and work building up, I never finished it. Maybe now I will.

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand"

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
"Cold Turkey", In These Times, May 10, 2004

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
A Man without a Country

"I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."
A Man without a Country

"During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice."
Hocus Pocus

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

Sirens of Titan

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
Slaughterhouse Five

-Kurt Vonnegut