Vonnegut Quotes

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle

“You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper.'

I didn't realize it was toilet paper.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment”
― Kurt Vonnegut (Author)

“We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“It's a small world." . . . "When you put it in a cemetery it is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“In this world, you get what you pay for.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Oh," said Castle. "Him." He shrugged. "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Poo-tee-weet?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“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

“Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace

“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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Vonnegut

“Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“The unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time — or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“So I wrote my speech in a round, bare room at the foot of a tower. There was a table and a chair. And the speech I wrote was round and bare are sparsely furnished, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegutut

“What should young people do with their lives?' That's a good question, and the writer Kurt Vonnegut once came up with a good answer.

'Many things, obviously,' he said. 'But the most daring is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Billy Baker, We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“You were just babies then!", she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I-I don't know", I said.
"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“It's sort of self-congratulatory to be the person who walks around pitying other people. I don't do that very much. I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble. I think there are some people who really need a lot of help.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“Oh, I have what a lot of people would probably call communistic thoughts,” said Eliot artlessly, “but, for heaven’s sakes, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time—or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater