Timequake by
Kurt Vonnegut, 1996.
I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: The believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!
Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."
Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.
In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats [Waller] or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."
Literature is all those la-di-da monkeys next door care about.
