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A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit. -- Kurt Vonnegut
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; "Of course I love you, So let's have a kid. Who will say exactly What its parents did; 'Of course I love you, So let's have a kid Who will say exactly What its parents did -'" Et cetera. -NOBLE CLAGGETT (1947-1966) -- Kurt Vonnegut
All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. -- Kurt Vonnegut
As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I sing of happiness, he says, and insecurity shows through
poisons it. I sing of unhappiness, and it spoils that, too, because my real unhappiness isn't great or noble but cheap
money unhappiness.
$10,000 a Year, Easy -- Kurt Vonnegut
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is - it's revenge. -- Kurt Vonnegut
But I'm still here. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She read my books the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage. -- Kurt Vonnegut
They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What passes for culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe you like being unhappy so much, you wouldn't do anything to change it. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No children. No books. Few friends. She seemed to know what she was doing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Love is a hawk with velvet claws
love is a rock with heart and veins
love is a lion with satin jaws
love is a storm with silken reins -- Kurt Vonnegut
There's a Chaplain who never visited the front. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! -- Kurt Vonnegut
He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than 14. A five-and-ten-cents store Cleopatra, a four letter word. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I hope you know that television and computers are no more your friends, and no more increasers of your brainpower, than slot machines. All they want is for you to sit still and buy all kinds of junk, and play the stock market as though it were a game of blackjack. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it babies, you've go to be kind". -- Kurt Vonnegut
Hello, out there, Heinz, in case you read this.
I was really very fond of you, to the extend that I am capable of being fond of anybody.
Give the Blarney Stone a kiss for me.
What were you doing in Hitler's bunker - looking for your motorcycle and your best friend? -- Kurt Vonnegut
Please look at the imperfect human being God gave to love you once, and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again."
"Jenny -- Kurt Vonnegut
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you? -- Kurt Vonnegut
Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There would be Jews in the pageant?" I asked him.
"Certainly-" he said, "thousands of them."
"May I ask, sir," I said, "where do you expect to find any Jews after the war? -- Kurt Vonnegut
At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody ... nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people Shouldn't have to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight? -- Kurt Vonnegut
Her face was one of a kind, a surprising variation that made observers think, Yes
that would be another very nice way for people to look. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. -- Kurt Vonnegut
How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho. -- Kurt Vonnegut
That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [ ... ] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting - other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Live by the foma1 that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. The Books of Bokonon. I: 5 -- Kurt Vonnegut
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Wrote the name and serial number of each prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead. So it goes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Forever searching for love in forms it never exists, places it can never be -- Kurt Vonnegut
I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He would make a good lamp post if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well? -- Kurt Vonnegut
You'll pardon me," said Beatrice, "if I fail to appreciate sarcasm and all the other brilliant nuances of your no doubt famous wit, Mr. Constant[ ... ] -- Kurt Vonnegut
He was held together by cotter pins, hose clamps, nuts, bolts, and magnets. Salo's tangerine-colored skin, which was so expressive when he was emotionally disturbed, could be put on or taken off like an Earthling wind-breaker. A magnetic zipper held it shut. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I think it's ugly, but I don't know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind. -- Kurt Vonnegut
When a couple has an argument nowadays they may think it s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: You are not enough people! -- Kurt Vonnegut
Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency'. -- Kurt Vonnegut
They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.
The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Aren't the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn't get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret and to get out of bodies every time there's an air raid or the enemy fires a rocket or something. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
How does it feel to watch the walls of your securities crumble? -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am committing suicide by cigarette, I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn't. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside.
"I fry mine in butter!" indeed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ... -- Kurt Vonnegut
It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in the USA if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What can any one person do?' he said.
'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are. -- 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. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I thought this was trash.
Of course it's trash! says Bokonon. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Accept that things happen. It may not be for a reason, and you may have no control over it, but the first step to getting through it is accepting what it is. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was something obscene about a billionaire's being optimistic and aggressive and cunning. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No matter how wonderful a sentence is, if it doesn't add new and useful information, it should be removed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The cold goblin spring of the crocuses was past.
The frail and chilly fairy spring of the daffodils was past.
The springtime for mankind had arrived, and the blooms of the lilac bowers outside Redwine's church hung flatly, heavy as Concord grapes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten ... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I consider writing an act of good citizenship. -- Kurt Vonnegut
So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget. -- Kurt Vonnegut
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Well, we are terribly divided politically, yes, and, you know, I don't mean to intimidate you and your listeners but I have a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. -- Kurt Vonnegut
In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space. The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence.
Circe Berman: Who isn't?. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I've been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It's just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody. -- Kurt Vonnegut
In the only love story he ever attempted, "Kiss Me Again," he had written, "There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time." The moral at the end of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are psychotic. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was one where he bet I couldn't tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I told him, 'God is love'. -- Kurt Vonnegut
As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People who sell bolts and nuts and locomotives and frozen orange juice make billions, while the people who struggle to bring a little beauty into the world, give life a little meaning, they starve.
$10,000 A Year, Easy -- Kurt Vonnegut
You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead? -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It wasn't that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can't say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I guess everybody who isn't dead yet is a survivor. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past -- Kurt Vonnegut
I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things - suicide, or the dreams I'd had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am embarrassed. We are all embarrassed. We Americans have guided our destinies so clumsily, with all the world watching, that we must now protect ourselves against our own government and our own industries. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it: "Nothing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.
Bomar -- Kurt Vonnegut
How I envy you creative people - creativity is a gift from the gods -- Kurt Vonnegut
That's what is was to be young - to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Roses are red,
And ready for plucking,
You're sixteen,
And ready for high school. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Well, it just don't seem like nobody feels he's worth a crap to nobody no more, and it's a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin' buggered by things they made theirselves. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I laughed. "Resi, darling - " I said, "you have a full life ahead of you." "I have a full life behind me - " she said, "all in those few sweet hours with you. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You got troubles, I got troubles
everybody's got troubles, whether they've got a lot of money or a little money or no money. When you get right down to it, I guess love and friendship and doing good really are the big things."
"Money Talks -- Kurt Vonnegut
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill. Like Dwayne Hoover, Trout was all alone at night, except for his pet. Trout, too, talked to his pet. But while Dwayne babbled to his Labrador retriever about love, Trout sneered and muttered to his parakeet about the end of the world. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary,' he whispered, his eyes closed. 'Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew. -- Kurt Vonnegut
This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: "Dear Lord - never put me in the charge of a frightened human being." Kenneth -- Kurt Vonnegut
If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? -- Kurt Vonnegut
The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war. -- Kurt Vonnegut
But there's two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist ... It's just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once that moment is gone it is gone forever. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He was a portly man, aslop in coffee and gravid with Danish pastry. -- Kurt Vonnegut
How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another chance. It was his addled understanding of the rules of warfare that the marksman should be given a second chance -- Kurt Vonnegut
Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be! -- Kurt Vonnegut
In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else
where everybody learns to make his or her own way. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm -- Kurt Vonnegut
A twerp was defined as a guy who put his set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What I want you to try and find out is, is there anything special going on or is it all just as crazy as it looked to me ? -- Kurt Vonnegut
The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks. -- Kurt Vonnegut
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again. They always did. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The arts, the arts, the arts - I don't know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land? -- Kurt Vonnegut
One foot in front of the other - through leaves, over bridges, said Newt. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A walk?" said Catharine.
"One foot in front of the other," said Newt, "through leaves, over bridges
-- Kurt Vonnegut
Just because I believe in evolution doesn't mean I have to approve of it -- Kurt Vonnegut
So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Anyway - because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The fact remains that I am stuck with the risk of being me. I am compelled, therefor, to spread the risk around a little, if I can. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?
Only verse: Nothing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances is now worth a pitcher of warm spit. That's because TV will not come and treat it respectfully. Television is really something. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No American is so old and poor and friend-less that he cannot make a collection of some of the most exquisite little ironies in town. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The wreckers against the builders!" said Elmer. "There's the whole story of life! -- Kurt Vonnegut
It's a widely accepted principle,' he says, 'that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it ... -- Kurt Vonnegut
We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian] -- Kurt Vonnegut
The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."
"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman? -- Kurt Vonnegut
Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The mosaicist was making the fine hairs on the nape of Mona's swan neck out of chips of gold -- Kurt Vonnegut
- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Bonnie made a joke now as she served him his martini. She made the same joke every time she served anybody a martini. "Breakfast of Champions," she said. -- Kurt Vonnegut
So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn't anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people
as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles
champions every one. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness! -- Kurt Vonnegut
Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If you wish to study a granfalloon, Just remove the skin of a toy balloon. -- Kurt Vonnegut
But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I beg you to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or frustrateor of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She couldn't send Billy out for ice cream or strawberries, since the atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the nearest strawberries and ice cream were millions of light years away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things
the people on the edge see them first. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: Make me young, make me young, make me young! -- Kurt Vonnegut
Bill Gates says, 'Wait till you can see what your computer can become.' But it's you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats! -- Kurt Vonnegut
We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The thing about money is," said Ben, "you can't be polite to it. Leave something suspicious to say, and it'll say it ... Leave something greedy to say, and it'll say it ... Leave something scary to say, and it'll say it."
"Money Talks -- Kurt Vonnegut
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle. -- Kurt Vonnegut
This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. "I see England," he said, "I see France - -- Kurt Vonnegut
Twenty-fours hours of sleeplessness had made her, in my eyes, anyway, and idealized representation of compassionate, long-suffering women of all ages everywhere. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I call TVs 'erasers' because they have not only wiped away the entire human experience to date, but whatever it was they were wetting their pants about only fifteen minutes earlier. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Every greedy, unreasonable dream I'd ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, the geese looked in the windows. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enimity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT,
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.
only he didn't say doggone. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And please note," he went on, "that when I gave you that priceless piece of information, my fingers were crossed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Don't blame you for trying to run away from yourself, but it can't be done - not even in a Buick. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There were thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. So they didn't have to. *** -- Kurt Vonnegut
Jesus
if Kilgore Trout could only write! Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is a planet in the Solar System where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. - Kilgore Trout -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes. There -- Kurt Vonnegut
The fat woman's expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'd be grateful if you'd say anything, true or not, because I ran out of ideas ... responsible or irresponsible, true or not, years ago. Stick your stainless steel spoon in this unhappy old man's brains Doctor ... and stir. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The message was contained in a sealed lead wafer that was two inches square and three-eighths of an inch thick. The wafer itself was contained in a gold mesh reticule which was hung on a stainless steel band clamped to the shaft that might be called Salo's neck. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me, he said. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Americans ... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible - to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him
news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And it's special meaning for me was this: It is proof that sometime back when my father was a young, young man, he must have had a moment or two when he felt that he might have reason to take himself and his life seriously. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful. -- Kurt Vonnegut
At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.
And she said, "That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give yourself. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He developed several hobbies that helped him to pass the time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
History is merely a list of surprises,' I said. 'It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No chimpanzee husband would stand by while his wife lost all her coconuts. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again - to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He often said that he wished that he could be a stone mason like me. He said a stone mason would have time and peace in which to think things out. I did not tell him that a stone mason thinks of little but stones and mortar. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for an Edenic continent stretching forever in all directions. Makes you religious. Takes your breath away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You were sick, but now you are well, and there is work to be done. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, "I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker." We are behaving in a bizarre manner. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived. -- Kurt Vonnegut
One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Kar.a.bek.i.an (n.); (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing Billy's body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for the first time -- Kurt Vonnegut
Goodness me, the clock has struck-
Alackday, and fuck my luck. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I only want to talk to you. The robbers are all in bed by now. Drunks, drifters, and poets are the only ones up this late at night. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?
The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985) -- Kurt Vonnegut
Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy's Christ died horribly. He was pitiful. So it goes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Speaking of plunging into war, do you know why I think George W. Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They brought us algebra. Also the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which Europeans had never had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. -- Kurt Vonnegut
SOMETIMES THE POOL-PAH," Bokonon tells us, "exceeds the power of humans to comment." Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as "shit storm" and at another point as "wrath of God. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It couldn't have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It's having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son - and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base. -- Kurt Vonnegut
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I have several children - seven, to be exact - too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say, Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am - Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You're wrong. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Me and Mike, ve vork in mine,
Holy shit, ve have good time.
Vunce a veek ve get our pay,
Holy shit, no vork next day. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You've got to be a good date for the reader. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We are so lonely because we don't have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If those birds hadn't been so stupid, so incapable of learning that human beings were dangerous, the first settlers would almost certainly have starved to death. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The town was Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. The walls were those of the Rumfoord estate. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Fraugh!" cried the sleeper, as though he suddenly understood all.
"Braugh!" he cried, not liking at all what he suddenly understood.
"Sup-foe!" he said, saying in no uncertain terms what he was going to do about it.
"Floof!" he cried. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and Earth was 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God - ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I will tell you how to make money: Work very hard. I will tell you how to win love: Wear nice clothing and smile all the time. Learn the words to all the latest songs. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He felt guilty about that, even though he knew he had done nothing he should feel guilty about. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said. Farewell, hello, farewell, hello. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We are all here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don't matter anymore. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. When seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. -- Kurt Vonnegut
That's a mistake,' he said. 'You miss an awful lot of life that way. That's why you Yankees are so cold,' he said. 'You think too much. That's why you marry so seldom. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would be two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is just dead machinery. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life ... -- Kurt Vonnegut
There are all these people bragging about how they're survivors, as though that's something very special. But the only kind of person who can't say that is a corpse. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I have no doubt that they'll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if the Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He'd tell them to give all their money away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow- whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears. -- Kurt Vonnegut
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We're - we're going to Paradise now?" said Constant. "I - I'm going to get into Paradise?"
"Don't ask me why, old sport," said Stony, "but somebody up there likes you. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Samaritrophia is only a disease, and a violent one, too, when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country had asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die. There -- Kurt Vonnegut
Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers -- Kurt Vonnegut
The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty. -- Kurt Vonnegut
God grant me the serentiy to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it
love yourself -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Just when you think there isn't any point to life - "he said, "then, all of a sudden, you realize that you are being aimed right straight at something. -- Kurt Vonnegut
That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense! Crosby -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia. -- Kurt Vonnegut
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. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Contentedly adrift in the cosmos. That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last? -- Kurt Vonnegut
What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor? -- Kurt Vonnegut
This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was a soft drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label boasted that it contained no nourishment whatsoever. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It's all like an ocean! cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn't have to be serious all the time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The pictures are bound to mutilate the words. Those words weren't meant to have pictures with them! -- Kurt Vonnegut
The mysteries of the materialization, like the mysteries of a hanging, were enhanced by the wall; were made pornographic by the magic lantern slides of morbid imaginations - magic lantern slides projected by the crowd on the blank stone walls. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky - as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment. -- Kurt Vonnegut
My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All was forgiven.
All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Socrates talks to an old duffer about what old age is like. The old duffer says in effect (I can't put my hands on the book just now) that he feels as though he'd been freed from a cruel and unreasonable master. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now."
"Money Talks -- Kurt Vonnegut
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver.
I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Well - all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am reminded of one of my father's novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I hear he liked flowers pretty well."
"Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."
"Out, Brief Candle -- Kurt Vonnegut
British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747 -- Kurt Vonnegut
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin? -- Kurt Vonnegut
As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it. -- Kurt Vonnegut
My God
life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?'
'Don't try,' he said. 'Just pretend you understand.'
'That's
that's very good advice.' I went limp. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Why did it have to happen?'It was one more hollow echo to the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a village idiot who was explaining that he didn't know anything about anything. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unk, you crazy son-of-a-bitch, I love you. I think you are the cat's pajamas. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Dresden was destroyed on the night of February 13, 1945," Billy Pilgrim began. "We came out of our shelter the next day." He told Montana about the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barbershop quartet. He told her about the stockyards with all the fenceposts gone, -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?"
"I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense! -- Kurt Vonnegut
But the "Get Tough America" policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, has earned us a name for obscene brutality, and cost the World the possibility of Germany's becoming a peaceful and intellectually fruitful nation in anything but the most remote future. -- Kurt Vonnegut
God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train! -- Kurt Vonnegut
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic, with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution. -- Kurt Vonnegut
In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausages and cheese, and out can shit and piss and language. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You're wise to be cautious. People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A bald man made an attempt on Constant's life with a hot dog. Stabbed at the window glass with it. Splayed the bun. Broke the frankfurter. Left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his children. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore. -- Kurt Vonnegut
They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society. -- Kurt Vonnegut
They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hipocrisy. -- Kurt Vonnegut
My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: "If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here." And so on. *** -- Kurt Vonnegut
A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokonists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, "Life is sure funny sometimes."
"And sometimes it isn't," said Marvin Breed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor who was exercising his right to bear arms. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Invitations to travel are like dancing lessons from God. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, You know - you never wrote a story with a villain in it. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Welcome to Earth, young man," I said. "It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you've got to be kind! -- Kurt Vonnegut
It was a politician's gesture - a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. -- Kurt Vonnegut
My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You will be swindled by termite exterminators and not even know it. You will buy steel-belted radial tires for the front wheels of your car. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Life goes on- and a fool and his self respect are soon parted ... -- Kurt Vonnegut
Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth."
"You don't seem to agree."
"I don't know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding
how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person. -- Kurt Vonnegut
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC -- Kurt Vonnegut
Every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. -- Kurt Vonnegut
What you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations -- Kurt Vonnegut
There i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do? -- Kurt Vonnegut
There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest
and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, "Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?" *** -- Kurt Vonnegut
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Men want a lot of pals - and they don't want people to get mad at them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Communism is what Karl Marx hoped could be an economic scheme for making industrialized nations take as good care of people, and especially of children and the old and disabled, as tribes and extended families used to do, before they were dispersed by the Industrial Revolution. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana's body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed. -- Kurt Vonnegut
This is the best of times and the worst of times. So what else is new? The bad news is that the Martians have landed in Manhattan, and have checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless people of all colors, and they pee gasoline. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why just go ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Your government does not exist and should not exist in order to keep you or anybody else, no matter what color, no matter what race, no matter what religion, from getting your damn fool feelings hurt. -- Kurt Vonnegut
And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine? -- Kurt Vonnegut
Dear Friends: As one who has experimented extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You know what truth is? [ ... ] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth? -- Kurt Vonnegut
A lover's a liar,
To himself he lies,
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters their eyes! -- Kurt Vonnegut
Constant was a male and Mrs. Rumfoord was a female, and Constant imagined that he had the means of demonstrating, if given the opportunity, his unquestionable superiority. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Look at him! That's life, according to the medical profession. Isn't life wonderful? -- Kurt Vonnegut
A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children, and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sorry," said Salo."I would say, 'Is there anything I can do?'- but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I'm like Karl Marx, I'm up for anything that makes people happy. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it'll be her wings not her face that'll make my mouth fall open. I've already seen the prettiest face that ever could be. -- Kurt Vonnegut
But, to Shepherd, life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up - for comparison with others scores - after each hole. -- Kurt Vonnegut
So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live at peace? -- Kurt Vonnegut
We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,' I said. 'That's how to act at a party. -- Kurt Vonnegut
So long, old pal. You're going to a different world now. It's sure to be a better one, since no other world could be as bad as this one is. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Then I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets - without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good? -- Kurt Vonnegut
His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand - passive resistance and open displays of contempt. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones - to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other, -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia, had contributed his share of the Green Beret. According to the Tralfamadorians, of course, the Green Beret would have seven parents in all. -- Kurt Vonnegut
No man who achieved greatness in the arts operated by himself; he was top man in a group of like-minded individuals. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. Only when free will kicked in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do. -- Kurt Vonnegut
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Son
they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You boys ain't got it so bad," he said to his rigid squadmates. "You oughta see how we treat the generals, if you think you's bad off. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Hell is other people," said Jean-Paul Sartre. "Hell is other real people,' is what he should have said. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside. -- Kurt Vonnegut
So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily taught to fear something seemingly specific - The Pluto Gang. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The only chance of my doing something really violent in favour or truth or justice or what have you would lie in my going homicidally insane. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again - morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically. -- Kurt Vonnegut
World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It -- Kurt Vonnegut
Have a good nap, did you?" said the porter. "Yes," said Billy. "Man," said the porter, "you sure had a hard-on. -- Kurt Vonnegut
[He was] mournfully pregnant with patriotism, and middle age, and imaginary wisdom. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, -- Kurt Vonnegut
All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again. -- Kurt Vonnegut
This is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on? -- Kurt Vonnegut
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her.
"Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Now, if others will rid the earth of vanity, ignorance, and want, mankind can live happily ever after. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say 'Shut up, I just got here myself'. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all
as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba ... -- Kurt Vonnegut
She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Never index your own book. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She went on to avow that she was tired of just pretending to meet people. -- Kurt Vonnegut
How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? -- Kurt Vonnegut
When machines start delivering themselves," I said, "I guess that's when the people better start really worrying. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A sane person to an insane society must appear insane. -- Kurt Vonnegut
As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea. -- Kurt Vonnegut
She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars. -- Kurt Vonnegut
But the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree. -- Kurt Vonnegut
All these years, I've been opening the window and making love to the world. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe. -- Kurt Vonnegut
The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's. -- Kurt Vonnegut
A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better then no drugs at all. -- Kurt Vonnegut
He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average. -- Kurt Vonnegut
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Hones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfueher Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony - That was how my father in law could contain one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -- Kurt Vonnegut
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" See all I've made, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars. And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. "Nice going, God! -- Kurt Vonnegut
Thus do I capitalize years as though they were proper names. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Guns and women can make an atom bombing look like an ice cream social. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: Just say no. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If somebody says 'I love you' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? 'I love you, too'. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Doris said the only thing anybody can say in an amateur theatrical society when somebody cries. She said, Why, no dear - you were marvelous. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. -- Kurt Vonnegut
There would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Any writer who presents an American home today where the television is not the head of the family is living in a fantasy world. -- Kurt Vonnegut
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much
who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could. -- Kurt Vonnegut
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe I did hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn't get at him because he just wasn't interested in people. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You mustn't speak certain kinds of truth, not if you want to go on living. -- Kurt Vonnegut
It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth. The -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. -- Kurt Vonnegut
We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the world's generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on earth. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Tastee-Freeze was a sort of frozen custard. It gave all the pleasure that ice cream could give, without the stiffness and bitter coldness of ice cream. -- Kurt Vonnegut
They made a science out of people?" she said. "What a crazy science that must be."
"Mr. Z -- Kurt Vonnegut
It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day. -- Kurt Vonnegut
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community. -- Kurt Vonnegut
You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he'd been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn't hate them. He simply found them comical. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes I don't consider myself very good at life, so I hide in my profession. -- Kurt Vonnegut