A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut - Piecing Together His Words

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?  Me?  I can have oodles of charm when I want to. No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.  

So here's my advice:

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe. If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

There are too many of us and we are all too far apart. But there is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. So make love when you can. It's good for you. It's to make your soul grow.

(You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit. All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. Actually, in nonsense is strength. But I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously.)

So.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. 

There is no why. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. 

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. All this happened, more or less. Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin. Everything is nothing, with a twist. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. 

In the end, we are what we imagine ourselves to be. 

And so it goes . . . Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And until you die . . . it's all life. 

And in the meantime, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos; where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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**With the exception of a few transitions, all lines in the above are verbatim quotes from the works of Kurt Vonnegut.