Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (234 Quotes)

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines. We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.

Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal.

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

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.

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference.

No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

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.

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.

The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

If you want to find a Granfalloon, remove the skin from a toy balloon.

The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

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

Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.

There in the hospital Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in times of war: he was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he is interesting to hear and see.

Earl Moncrief, the butler, built his financial, procurement, and secret service organizations with the brute power of cash and a profound understanding of clever, malicious, discontented people who lived behind servile facades.

The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.

It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world - in the form of bad ideas.

There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.

In this world, you get what you pay for.

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

You are what you pretend to be, so be careful about who you pretend to be.

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.

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

There is one other book,. that can teach you everything you need to know about life...it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

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.

The righteously displeased crowds existed now in every part of the world. The total membership of the Churches of God the Utterly Indifferent was a good, round three billion. The young lions who had first taught the creed could now afford to be lambs, to contemplate such oriental mysteries as water trickling down a bell rope.