Results for Fates Worse than Death
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fate worse than death, a

A highly undesirable occurrence, a misfortune, as in Dean thinks driving daily during rush hour is a fate worse than death. Formerly applied quite seriously to a woman's loss of virginity, this idiom today is used hyperbolically and far more loosely. [1600s]


 
 
Wikipedia: Fates Worse than Death
Fates Worse Than Death
Image:Fates Worse than Death.png
Front Cover
Author Kurt Vonnegut
Country Flag of the United States USA
Language English
Publisher Berkley Trade
Publication date 1990 (1st edition),
September 1, 1992 (Reprint)
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 240
ISBN ISBN 978-0-42-513406-1

Fates Worse than Death, subtitled An Autobiographical Collage, is a 1990 collection of essays, speeches, and other previously uncollected writings by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. In the introduction to the book, Vonnegut acknowledges that the book is similar to an earlier book, Palm Sunday. In it he discusses his attempted suicide.

This book also includes a "humanist requiem" that Vonnegut wrote as a reaction to the Roman Catholic Requiem, which he had heard in Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting and whose text he found offensive.[1] Vonnegut's own text was then set as a "Cosmos Cantata" by the composer Seymour Barab, of whom Vonnegut said, "Barab's music is full of magic. He proved to an atheist that God exists. What an honor to have worked with him."[2] The ending of this text is as follows:

"Let not eternal light disturb our sleep, O Cosmos, for Thou art merciful. Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness. On that dread day when the heavens and earth shall quake, when we shall dissolve the world into glowing ashes in the name of gods unknowable, I am seized with trembling and I am afraid until that day of reckoning shall arrive. Hence I pray, Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness on that day of wrath, calamity and misery. Rest grant us, O Cosmos, and let not light perpetual disturb our sleep."[3]

 
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Idioms. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fates Worse than Death" Read more

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