• From Player Piano –

Lying abed after the stout-hearted men's evening at the Kroner's, Doctor
Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being
richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent
shape to afford integrity. He was worth, without having to work another
day in his life, almost three-quarters of a million dollars.

• From Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade –

     Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working
on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
     I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised
his eyebrows and inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'
     'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'
     'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war
books?'
     'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'
     'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'
     What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they
were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

     And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be
plain old death.

• From Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday!

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on
a planet which was dying fast.
     One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was
a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken.
As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and
respected human beings in history.
     The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named
Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

• The last lines of Requiem, from A Man without a Country –

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

"And so it goes ..." – RIP,  Kurt, you enriched my life.