Maybe it’s a matter of personal experience. There are things that won’t really resonate with you unless you yourself went through them, and no great prose can make you truly feel and understand what the writer felt. Words can be weak that way.

In that book, Vonnegut is talking about war — something he experienced intimately. If you’re lucky enough to have never been through war, then in this excerpt, you might see prose that’s irrelevant to you. But someone touched by war will see a helpless, hopeless wish for that war to have never happened, because there’s nothing, nothing worse and more terrible than war. Vonnegut wants the war plane pilots — those sky murderers — to go back to the hopeful kids they once were, and the shells and missiles to go back to earth as minerals that can’t hurt anyone.

If you’ve never feared a missile hitting you or your house, you’ll likely find that bit boring and rambling, and I’m glad for you. But people who know that fear, will know just how real Vonnegut’s words are, and how powerful, and how heartfelt.