Kurt Vonnegut

“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. *Harmless untruths”

“We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the world’s generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about every city on earth.”

“Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass”

“…he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.”

“Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.”

“The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.”

“I told him that if we doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War (1914-1918). In the title story he proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and "the damned human race." If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind the date.”

“Eliza—” I said, “so many of the books I’ve read to you said love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now.” “Go ahead,” she said. “I love you, Eliza,” I said. She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.” “Why not?” I said. ”It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?”

“While bachelors are lonely people, I'm convinced that married men are lonely people with dependents.”

“The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.”

“The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.”

“The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.”

“In this world, you get what you pay for.”

“The unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.”

“It's a small world." . . . "When you put it in a cemetery it is.”

“It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.”

“There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler.I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on.I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said.It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.”Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.”

“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.”

“Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence,Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance.His body, empty, prowls the earth,Earning what a body’s worth.If his body and his essence remain apart,Burn his body, but spare this, his heart”

“There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

“The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:ETC.”

“Invitations to travel are like dancing lessons from God.”

“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.”

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”

“Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”

“It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. [...] And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is an implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. That is so untrue that it makes me want to cry--or laugh.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could. ”

“I believe all this, and much, much more, because I guess it is my duty to. But I pay a price for my gaga credulity, which I want to describe as a sort of intellectual seasickness.”

“I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.”

“By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

“Now, you can say your Daddy is right and the other little child's Daddy is wrong, but the universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.”

“Mother Nature Personified.”

“He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.”

“If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.”

“Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live.”

“I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit.”

“For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.”

“Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.”

“The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see”

“What in hell is a girl with hips like yours doing selling death?”

“I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.”

“I never asked to be born in the first place.”

“But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.”

“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.)”

“They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.The first is, ”Here I am, here I am, here I am.”The second is, ”So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are”

“What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”