Kurt Vonnegut Jr, 1922-2007: Last line of book

New York Times; SFGate; The Guardian; Globe and Mail.

From Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

From Breakfast of Champions:

Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father’s voice: “Make me young, make me young, make me young!”

From Player Piano:
”You think I’m insane?” said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

”You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”

”Barely– barely.”

”A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”

Finnerty shook his head. ”He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, ”Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”