All Is Optional

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will:

1. 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.
2. Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
3. Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
4. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
5. She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.
6. 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.
7. There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
8. Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
9. That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
10. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
11. All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
12. Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?
13. So it goes.
14. I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ’science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
15. We must be careful about what we pretend to be.