R.I.P., Pilgrim

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922 — 2007

New York Times Books on his death.

Kurt Vonnegut quotes:

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

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.

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.

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

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules— and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

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

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now.

A poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called Requiem, has these closing lines:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,

It is done.
People did not like it here.

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