“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“I want to stay as close to 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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Here’s all she had to say about death: “Oh my, oh my.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“A walk?” said Catharine.
“One foot in front of the other,” said Newt, “through leaves, over bridges—”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“She was a tiny girl—a trinket brunette, very pretty, very pale, and hard as nails.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. 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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“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
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Signore, come muore un uomo quando viene privato della consolazione della letteratura?”
“In uno o due modi,” disse lui, “per pietrificazione del cuore o per atrofia del sistema nervoso.”
“Entrambi poco piacevoli, immagino” azzardai.
“Per niente piacevoli” disse Castle il vecchio. “Per l’amor di Dio, vi prego, continuate a scrivere, tutti e due!”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Poput tolikih patoloških ličnosti koje su prije milijun godina bile od moći, mogao je učiniti gotovo sve prepuštajući se trenutačnom porivu i ne osjećajući gotovo ništa. Logička objašnjenja za njegova djela, izmišljena u dokolici, uvijek su dolazila kasnije.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.
Everything was necessary. He saw an old white woman fishing through a garbage can. That was necessary. He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer. It had to be there.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“He told Trout about people he’d heard of in the area who grabbed live copperheads and rattlesnakes during church services, to show how much they believed that Jesus would protect them.
‘Takes all kinds of people to make up a world,’ said Trout.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“In a 1972 story titled “The Big Space Fuck,” Kurt Vonnegut names his spaceship with “eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose” the Arthur C. Clarke, “in honor of a famous space pioneer.” Its mission is to impregnate the Andromeda Galaxy.”
― Michael Benson
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“They needed lots of peace and quiet,” said Roy, “and so do I, and so do you, I guess, and I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I wasn’t doing anything a bird wouldn’t do.”
Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.
They don’t make memories like that anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“She had replied, “You’re a survivor, too, Willard.”
“Well,” he had said, ” I used to think I was one, Mrs. Kaplan. Now I’m not so sure. I guess everybody who isn’t dead yet is a survivor.”
“Now, now,” she had said, “let’s talk about something pleasant. Let’s talk about Baltra.”
But the blood supply to his brain must have been momentarily dependable then, because *Wait had continued to follow this line of reasoning. He’d even given a dry little laugh. He’d said, “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.”
“There, there,” she’d said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Mr. Trout–?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are–are you Kilgore Trout?’
‘Yes.” Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
‘The–the writer?’ said Billy.
‘The what?’
Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. ‘There’s a writer named Kilgore Trout.’
‘There is?’ Trout looked foolish and dazed.
‘You never heard of him?’
Trout shook his head. ‘Nobody–nobody ever did.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. 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
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Now I will destroy the whole world.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“Society is more concerned with material possessions than it is with the true love and compassion of another human being.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn’t how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn’t think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. “Thank you very much,” I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. “You’re entirely welcome,” she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“It’s nice to be nice.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today-jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock and roll, hip hop and on and on- is derived from the blues.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“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”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“The mind reels.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers’ blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“The creatures reproduce by flaking. The young, when shed by a parent, are indistinguishable from dandruff.
There is only one sex.
Every creature simply sheds flakes of his own kind, and his own kind is like everybody else’s kind.
There is no childhood as such. Flakes begin flaking three Earthling hours after they themselves have been shed.
They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing.
There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another.
Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown.
The creatures only have one sense: touch.
They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.
The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.”
The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“When you’re dead you’re dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United Staes of America, too. We argued that it was a good scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves– and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like too many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Billy Pilgrim: “You guys go on without me. I’ll be alright.”
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Quasi non ci sono personaggi, in questa storia, e quasi non ci sono confronti drammatici, perché la maggior parte degli individui che vi figurano sono mal ridotti, sono solo trastulli indifferenti in mano a forze immense. Uno dei principali effetti della guerra è, in fondo, che la gente è scoraggiata dal farsi personaggio.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped.
[…] He closed his eyes, and opened them again. He was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Tiek uzskatīts, ka pēc apkaušanas jāvalda kapa klusumam, un valda jau arī, tikai putni klaigā.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Prettanku nodaļas ierindnieks būdams, viņš bija palīdzējis izšaut vienu svēta naida lādiņu no 57 mm prettanku granātmetēja. Šāviens gāja vaļā ar pamatīgu žvīkstoņu gluži kā visvarenā debesu dieva bikšu rāvslēdzis.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Deja ar nāvi ir mākslas pamatu pamats. Patiesība ir nāve. Es braši cīnījos ar viņu, cik vien spēju… es dejoju ar viņu, apviju viņu ar ziediem, griezu viņu valsī… rotāju viņu ar lentēm, kutināju viņu…”
― Kurt Vonnegut