by Kurt Vonnegutt
“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’ …
Lucky me, lucky mud.”
Observations
Vonnegut’s humor is the closest thing to prayer in a world that’s stopped believing.
These snippets feel like fragments of modern scripture: absurd, self-aware, and unexpectedly kind.
Quotes
“Busy, busy, busy,” is what we Bokonists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life sure is funny sometimes.”
“And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.
“You know what I mean by a pissant?”
“I know the term,” I said, “but it obviously doesn’t have the same ding-a-ling connotations for me that it has for you.”
“If you want an expert opinion, money doesn’t necessarily make people happy.”
“Thanks for the information. You’ve just saved me a lot of trouble. I was just about to make some money.”
“The happiness is mine.”
“I believe in obeying the laws of whatever country I happen to be in.”
“You are not telling me the news.”
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.
“I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it’s unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.”
“If I am ever put to death on the hook,” Bokonon warns us, “expect a very human performance.”
“In the beginning, God created the Earth, and He looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, ‘Let us make living creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.’
And one was man. Mud as man alone could speak.
‘What is the purpose of all this?’ man asked politely.
‘Everything must have a purpose?’ asked God.
‘Certainly,’ said man.
‘Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,’ said God. And He went away.”