Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

“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, Breakfast of Champions

“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, Breakfast of Champions

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“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

“What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”
― 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, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.”
― Philip José Farmer

“Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Here's all she had to say about death: "Oh my, oh my.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“A walk?" said Catharine.
"One foot in front of the other," said Newt, "through leaves, over bridges---”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“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, Galápagos

“If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too over optimistic.”
― Ray Bradbury

“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, Slaughterhouse-Five

“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, Bennington College Address (1970)

“What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The happiest life consists of ignorance,
Before you learn how to grieve or rejoice."
--SOPHOCLES (496-406 B.C.)”
― Sophocles

“Vonnegut did not seem to be saying, as I understood Hem[ingway] to be saying, that his Terrible Event had forever exempted him from the usual human obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness--a simple, idiotic failure of belief in the human, by men and their systems--had been the cause of his Terrible Event, and that what he had learned from this experience was not the importance of being tough and hard and untouchable, but the importance of preserving the kindness in ourselves at all costs.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“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, Galápagos

“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, Galápagos

“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, Breakfast of Champions

“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, Breakfast of Champions

“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, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece

“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, Slaughterhouse-Five

“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, Galápagos

“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

“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, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Now I will destroy the whole world.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past... All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. -Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion