Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Quotes

‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
They made a science out of people?" she said. "What a crazy science that must be."--"Mr. Z
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
It couldn't have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It's having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Skyscraper National Park
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
As I spoke of another's love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses.--"Tango
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
May I ask you a highly personal question?""It's what life does all the time.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Flashlight beams danced crazily
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. "I fry mine in butter!" indeed.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: "Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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 Jr.
Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before. I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!"She jerked her head away from the eyepiece."Hello," I said."You scared me to death," she said."Sorry," I said, and I laughed.These ancient games go on and on. It's nice they do.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o'clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Maturity,” Bokonontells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unlesslaughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then it's time to eat stones again.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: "I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down." Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. "Why?" I asked him. "If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'--you would have a very great book." "Do you know the answer?" I said. "No," he said, "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it." "Any guesses?" I said. "No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who volunteered."He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. And he came back, and he said to me: "There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. There was much music played through them. Those who were musical told me it was often good music--sometimes the best." "That's interesting," I said. "There was no music by Jews," he said. "That was forbidden." "Naturally," I said. "And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement. All day long, music and announcements." "Very modern," I said. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. "There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. Many times a day it came. It was the call for the Sonderkommando." "Oh?" I said. "Leichentärger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse."In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. "After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
...Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,' the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. 'Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?''I missed that,' I murmured. ' I saw that,' said Sandra. 'About two days ago.''That's right,' said the bartender.'What is the secret of life?' I asked.'I forget,' said Sandra.'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found out something about protein.''Yeah,' said Sandra, 'that's it.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The doctors agreed: He was going crazy...they didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.