quoth vonnegut

My favorite writer, by a whisker, is kurt vonnegut. I haven't read all his works, as i decided at some point to be relaxed in my pursuit thereof, with the idea that when i'm old there will be treasures yet to cherish. Much of the latter half of his canon awaits. SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE is considered his masterpiece, but i don't agree. Great, to be sure, but above it i would place BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS, GALAPAGOS, BLUEBEARD, and the introduction to MOTHER NIGHT. Here then, a collection of quotes from one of America's two greatest writers, a human whose words touched me during my early adulthood like no author before or since.

-"The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide."
-"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
-"Everybody's shaking in his boots. So don't be bluffed."
-"One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war."
-"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart."
-"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
-"Live by the foma (harmless untruths) that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
-"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
-"In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were."
-"The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...Oh boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well-connected. So it goes."
"[She] has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die."
-"You realize, of course, that everything i say is horseshit."
-"We're here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
-"I want to stay as close to the edge as i can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."