Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished fronti… - Kurt Vonnegut

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry — or laugh.

In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along.

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.