Mark Vonnegut Quotes

#1. My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

Mark Vonnegut

#2. Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

Mark Vonnegut

#3. Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Mark Vonnegut

#4. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

Mark Vonnegut

#5. With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

Mark Vonnegut

#6. It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

Mark Vonnegut

#7. It's probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well.

Mark Vonnegut

#8. I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

Mark Vonnegut

#9. We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

Mark Vonnegut

#10. Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

Mark Vonnegut

#11. Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

Mark Vonnegut

#12. I'm willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.

Mark Vonnegut

#13. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.

Mark Vonnegut

#14. The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. 'It's not Harvard,' he said.
'Harvard's not Harvard either,' I answered.

Mark Vonnegut

#15. A happy person with decent self-esteem wouldn't bother to have credentials as good as mine.

Mark Vonnegut

#16. None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.

Mark Vonnegut

#17. After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

Mark Vonnegut

#18. Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.

Mark Vonnegut

#19. Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

Mark Vonnegut

#20. Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

Mark Vonnegut

#21. Medical care has become a lot of crust and precious little pie.

Mark Vonnegut

#22. Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

Mark Vonnegut

#23. Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Mark Vonnegut

#24. Today it's nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won't make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won't make you well.

Mark Vonnegut

#25. Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths. Folk

Mark Vonnegut

#26. Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.

Mark Vonnegut

#27. There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.'

Mark Vonnegut

#28. Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one's family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.

Mark Vonnegut

#29. Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

Mark Vonnegut

#30. My father was a proudly antisocial man who spent most of his time at a typewriter, reflecting negatively on his neighbors and society, throwing in things like "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." The emphasis was on the Goddamn it. He was proud of the fact that I had no friends

Mark Vonnegut

#31. We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

Mark Vonnegut

#32. My only hope was to be polite.

Mark Vonnegut

#33. Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct - the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

Mark Vonnegut

#34. What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

Mark Vonnegut

#35. I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.

Mark Vonnegut

#36. I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms
it's to frighten off extroverts

Mark Vonnegut

#37. As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

Mark Vonnegut

#38. The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal.

Mark Vonnegut

#39. The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service

Mark Vonnegut

#40. The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.

Mark Vonnegut

#41. If you believe that the dollars made by the pharmaceutical industry are plowed back into research that leads to better and better medications, you probably believe in the tooth fairy as well.

Mark Vonnegut

#42. Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life.

Mark Vonnegut

#43. And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

Mark Vonnegut

#44. I'm subject to occasional theological nightmares. The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I'm asked is where I went to college.

Mark Vonnegut

#45. Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

Mark Vonnegut

#46. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.

Mark Vonnegut

#47. If nothing I say sparks any thoughts or identification, it's possible you're taking too much medication. If it's the greatest talk you've ever heard, you're not taking enough.

Mark Vonnegut

#48. But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.

Mark Vonnegut