Excerpt from MOTHER NIGHT by Kurt Vonnegut

"I'm not your destiny, or the Devil, either!"  I said.  "Look at you!  Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus!  And that's all the glory you deserve!" I said.  "That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.  Where's evil?  It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.  It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

"It's that part of an imbecile, " I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."

Whether it was my words or humiliation or booze or surgical shock that made O'Hare throw up, I do not know.  THrow up he did.  he flashed the hash down the stairwell from four stories up.

"Clean it up," I said.

he faced me, his eyes still filled with undiluted hatred.  "I'll get you yet, brother," he said.

"That may be," I said.  "But it won't change your destiny of bankruptcies, frozen-custard, too many children, termites, and no cash.  If you want to be a soldier in the Legions of God so much," I told him, "try the Salvation Army."

And  O'Hare went away.

-Kurt Vonnegut, jr., MOTHER NIGHT, chapter 44