He would have been 88 years old today. He changed my head for the better. His words about death are tattooed on my chest. Here are some of my favorite quotes of his. Maybe one day I’ll get them all Tattooed on me.

“Busy, busy, busy.” - Cat’s Cradle

“So it goes.” - Slaughter house 5 (Recurring statement throughout the novel on the subject of death, now tattooed on my chest)

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have 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.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’” - Slaughter House 5

“I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.” - Breakfast Of Champions

“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery” - Breakfast Of Champions.

“I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that’s not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don’t even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.” -  Hocus Pocus

“Why so many of us a million years ago purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be we were trying to to give evolution a shove in the right direction — in the direction of smaller brains.” - Galapagos

“Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.” - Cold Turkey

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

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.  - Man Without a Country

“Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.” - Man Without a Country

“If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.” - Man Without a Country

“You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.”