If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the idea that after reaching a certain age, life often feels less like a narrative and more like a conclusion.
Kurt Vonnegut suggests that once one has lived a significant portion of life, their experiences may no longer contribute to a dynamic story, but instead resemble an epilogue. This implies that while life continues, the transformative and dramatic elements that define a compelling narrative may have diminished, leaving individuals to reflect on their past rather than chase new adventures.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech discussing aging and life reflection.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
One of the great benefits of organised religion is that you can be forgiven your sins, which must be a wonderful thing. I mean, I carry my sins around with me, there's nobody there to forgive them.
Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.
The ultimate aim of Karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of its participants.
In order to satisfy one human stomach, so many lives are taken away. We must promote vegetarianism. It is extremely important.
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
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