"I’m simply becoming."

A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut

P. 3

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. 

P.3

Freud said that humor is a response to frustration - one of several. 

P. 19

We were trying to remember funny stuff about our time as prisoners of war in Dresden, tough talk and all that stuff that would make a nifty war movie. And his wife, Mary O’Hare, blew her stack. She said, “You were nothing but babies then” And that is true of soldiers. They are in fact babies. They are not movie stars. They are not Duke Wayne. And realizing that was the key, I was finally free to tell the truth. We were children and the subtitle of Slaughterhouse Five became The Children’s Crusade.

P. 24

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well of badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. 

P. 37

I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho. But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Sharespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. 

P. 56

We have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, “Wait till you can see what your computer can become.” But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do. 

P. 61

We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different. 

P. 66

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.

P. 68

He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that. 

P. 80

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humansist do, “If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”

P. 82

Guessers, in fact, knew no more that the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies. 

P. 92

The Guessers revealed something else about themselves, too, which we should duly note today. They aren’t really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to - as, however ignorantly, their guessing goes on and on and on. If there’s anything they hate, it’s a wise human.

So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honorable. 

P. 106

But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society. 

P. 122

“The Good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were to damn cheap and lazy.”

P. 130 

I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. 

P. 131

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown - up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.” 

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it. 

Dan, That was my bad uncle, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war. 

P. 132

His principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” 

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “ If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

P. 153

There are two sorts of artists, one  not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.

P. 153

What you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.