Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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.

The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

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.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.

I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.

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.

We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.

He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.

My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

... life, by definition, is never still.

Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.

We don't make bicycles anymore. It's all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everyone to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

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.

One thing I learned, with permission of the school committee of Indianapolis, was that when a tyrant or a government gets in trouble it wonders what to do. Declare war! Then nothing else matters. It's like chess; when in doubt, castle.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

As a matter of social class Ku Klux Klan would have been regarded as white trash.

Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.

Just because something feels better than anything else, that doesn't mean it's good for you.

The arts are not a way to make a living.