Fates Worse Than Death Quotes

“If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop's suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“I only wish the NRA and its jellyfish, well-paid supporters in legislatures both State and Federal would be careful to recite the whole of it, and then tell us how a heavily armed man, woman, or child, recruited by no official, led by no official, given no goals by any official, motivated or restrained only by his or her personality and perceptions of what is going on, can be considered a member of a well-regulated militia.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“The books he and his supporters wanted out of the schools, one of mine among them, were not pornographic, although he would have liked our audience to think so. (There is the word "motherfucker" one time in my Slaughterhouse-Five, as in "Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker." Ever since that word was published, way back in 1969, children have been attempting to have intercourse with their mothers. When it will stop no one knows.)”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“He told me off camera that he was despised by his neighbors for remembering when it was time to forget.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“It so happens, though—a wholly unforeseen accident—that the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“Love is simply too strong a word to be of much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“I got a letter asking me if I had any suggestions for a revision of the Pledge of Allegiance, and I answered by return mail: 'I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and the flag which is its symbol, with liberty and justice for all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“To all my friends and relatives in Alcoholics Anonymous, I say that they were right to become intoxicated. Life without moments of intoxication is not worth ‘a pitcher of spit,’ as the felicitous saying goes. They simply chose what was for them a deadly poison on which to get drunk.

Good examples of harmless toots are some of the things children do. They get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“When my father was sixty-five and I was twenty-seven, I said to him, thinking him a very old man, that it must have been fun for him to be an architect. He replied unexpectedly that it had been no fun at all, since architecture had everything to do with accounting and nothing to do with art.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

“Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: Imagining that something somewhere wants us to like it here.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage