So It Goes.

This is a post about Kurt Vonnegut. Unfortunately for me, I have only read 3.5 (Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, Bluebeard) of his novels. He is phenomenal, and if I may say so, the best American novelist of recent times. Granted, I don't get to read much anymore, but when I happened upon Vonnegut last year in Nepal, I facepalmed and asked myself why I had not read him before.
I have been thinking about Vonnegut because I took out three books of his from our library, and only read half of one before running out of time and renewals because I have too much reading on stupid linguistics to do. I also think of him every time I go to Indy (where he grew up), which I did yesterday. He is not buried there. So it goes.
Here are some quotes. They do not do him justice. I cannot do him justice except to say he's one of the three poets of my soul. Read a book, read a couple, and then tell me he's no good.

"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.'" --from Timequake

"They had no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies. Clarinets and harps and pianos and so on would have been redundant, would have been machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls." --from Jailbird

"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become." -- from Breakfast of Champions

"To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool."
--from Breakfast of Champions, in response to the question "What is the purpose of life?"

And from books I haven't read and just random quotes found from the internet:

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

"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."

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