RIP: Kurt Vonnegut

9 PM last night - Astrobuff:
Kurt Vonnegut has died and will no doubt be turning in his grave for many years to come.

Source: NY Times 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 last night in Manhattan. He was 84.

6 AM: Kayakbiker

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favorite anti-war novels. I am not a fan of science-fiction, mostly because most of it sucks. I place this novel in my top ten and would use its content as a major part of the foundation to make my case for being a conscientious objector.

A great mind has passed.

6:15: Comrade Chris

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. Kurt Vonnegut

Comments

[not my president]

Lead story on NPR, even before the Green Zone bombing in Iraq.
Wouldn't have surprised Vonnegut ..

The RaversG are on it.

& more from Chris:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote fiction that was sardonically less strange than
>reality
>
>I hope he can help the Universe write an appropriate ending to the
>story of the last 6+ years....
>

[Kurt Vonnegut is Dead]

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
Kurt Vonnegut

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Kurt Vonnegut

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Kurt Vonnegut

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
Kurt Vonnegut

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Kurt Vonnegut

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut

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

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Kurt Vonnegut

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Kurt Vonnegut

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

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Kurt Vonnegut

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
Kurt Vonnegut

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Kurt Vonnegut

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Kurt Vonnegut

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Kurt Vonnegut

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
Kurt Vonnegut

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
Kurt Vonnegut

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Kurt Vonnegut

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Kurt Vonnegut

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut

[Doug Tarnopol]

My comments, other articles, and an excellent documentary on Vonnegut, are here: http://free--expression.blogspot.com/2007/04/our-mark-twain-is-dead.html

I think Vonnegut picked exactly the right time to take his leave; our fate may not be as kind as to die after a fall at 84.