Last night finished Vonnegut’s…
A Man Without a Country.
I finished my first Kurt Vonnegut book. It’s been long overdue and I’ve always been a little ashamed about never having read any Vonnegut. I’ve only skimmed through excerpts & interviews in magazines or through the web.
So I read A Man Without a Country.
Vonnegut’s final publication, and unlike most of his works this one is nonfiction, he mostly rants about the absurdities of our country.
And I loved it. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”
“[Vietnam] only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”
“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t’ know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.”
“George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.”
“If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC.”
“While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one slider said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it.
If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.
“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
Next Vonnegut Read: Slaughterhouse Five
