" Vonnegut did not seem to be saying, as I understood them to be saying, that his terrible event had forever exempted him from the usual human obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness - a simple idiotic failure of belief in the human, by men and their systems - has been the cause of his terrible event, and that what he had learned from this experience was not the importance of being tough and hard and untouchable, but the importance of preserving the kindness in ourselves at all costs. "

― George Saunders