"Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."My favorite author of all time, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., died on April 11th in Manhattan. He was 84. We was a humanist and a humorist of the highest order. He had fallen at his Manhattan home several weeks prior an suffered irreversible brain injury. So it goes.
He was most famous for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but I've read and treasured all of his 14 plus novels. Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions and The Sirens of Titan are among my favorites. If you haven't read any of his novels, do yourself a favor and pick one up. They are a pure delight in every way to read.
My favorite quote from Mother Night is "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
And from The Books of Bokonon in Cat's Cradle:
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
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
