Top 100 Quotes About Kurt Vonnegut
#2. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Kurt Vonnegut
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Indianapolis, Indiana," said Constant, "is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian - " said Constant, "that's the kind of people for me." Salo's
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#8. 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
#9. And please note," he went on, "that when I gave you that priceless piece of information, my fingers were crossed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#10. 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
#11. To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
#12. He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
Kurt Vonnegut
#21. Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut
#23. Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
Kurt Vonnegut
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#27. He felt guilty about that, even though he knew he had done nothing he should feel guilty about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#29. 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
#30. I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret
#32. I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. 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
#34. It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. I was about to be attacked by a Doberman pinscher. He was a leading character in an earlier version of this book. ***
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#36. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. 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
#38. The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache.
Kurt Vonnegut
#39. 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
#40. I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. 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
#42. I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. 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
#47. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. 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
#51. No sense in a man with writer's block going to New York.
Kurt Vonnegut
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. 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
#58. High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now."
"Money Talks
Kurt Vonnegut
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#67. 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
#68. The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. I
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#70. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#71. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
Kurt Vonnegut
#72. You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.
Kurt Vonnegut
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. It's all such crap," she said. "I find this magazine called People in garbage cans," she said, "but it isn't about people. It's about crap.
Kurt Vonnegut
#77. 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
#79. The pictures are bound to mutilate the words. Those words weren't meant to have pictures with them!
Kurt Vonnegut
#80. There were thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop.
Kurt Vonnegut
#81. 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
#82. Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live.
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. Just 'cause something makes you feel better than anything else, that don't mean it's good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#86. In honor of the marriage that worked, I include in this collection a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies' Home Journal, God help us, entitled by them "The Long Walk to Forever." The title I gave it, I think, was "Hell to Get Along With.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#87. 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
#88. What we have created instead, as customers and employers and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.
Many members of my generation are disappointed.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#89. All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.
Kurt Vonnegut
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. Something is always going wrong with our teeth. They don't last anything like a lifetime, usually. What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery?
Kurt Vonnegut
#95. ... lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#96. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
#97. 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
#98. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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