So it goes

One of my all-time favorite authors has passed on. He was a great influence, if not the influence on my philosophy of nearly everything. He will continue to be a great influence on anyone with a head on their shoulders who picks up a book of his and reads his unapologetic candor on life, love, war, humanity, God, knees and envelopes.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. November 11th, 1922 - April 11th, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterns' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions 1993

May I add Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle and even Galapagos to that list of what is sacred. Vonnegut wouldn't like it, but I don't care, it's my list, and what one holds dear is really all that really makes anything sacred.

Whereas I was stunned with the death of Douglas Adams, and mourned for the loss of books that I'll never get to enjoy because they can't be written, here I mourn for the loss of a voice of reason and humanity in a world of insanity.

The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was
elected.

Kurt Vonnegut, March 4th, 2006 in The Free Press

He already said he was done writing, he was ready for the end, whatever that may be. I'm not sad to see a man ready for death gone across the veil, but I am sad for our own loss of that man.

The only proof he needed for the existence of God, was music.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. January 7th, 2006 Sunday Herald, on his requested epitaph

May you find what you're looking for, Mr. Vonnegut. We will miss you.