Comments for Kilgore Trout Has Left the Building: Kurt Vonnegut Dead at http://atlanticfreepress.com , comment 1 to 1 out of 1 comments http://atlanticfreepress.com Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:38:59 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/1343-kilgore-trout-has-left-the-building-kurt-vonnegut-dead.html#comment-1870 He was such a great writer and thinker. I hope more folks read his work. We certainly need that keen critical, humorous understanding of the world. He had a knack for reminding us of the need for species humility -- to remember our place in the order of things. Certainly gives us a chance to tell more people about his work. I posted a few of my favorite Vonnegut lines on my own site but a few bear connection to what you wrote: But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication. Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times 01/27/03 "Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia — what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!" -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine in Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan Another time Billy heard Eliot Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five "There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope they are organized along the lines of the Mafia." Winston Niles Rumfoord in Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan - a guest Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:30:00 +0100