Kurt Vonnegut

“The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.”

“There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed.”

“The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.”

“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.”

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.”

“If you can do no good, at least do no harm.”

“Sure the bible might be the greatest story ever told, but the most popular story is about a couple who has a good time fornicating, but then stops for one reason or another while it is still a novelty. ”

“The bible may be the greatest story every told, but the most popular story is about a couple fornicating that stops for one reason or another while it is still novel.”

“I fry mine in butter!”

“As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.”

“Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.”

“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, thesky, the stars."And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and lookaround.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 certainlycouldn't have.I feel very unimportant compared to You.The only way I can feel the least bit important is tothink of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up andlook 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.”

“To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. -Mr. Vonnegut”

“The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.”

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”

“You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here.”

“His very first story, he told me as he was dying, was set in Camelot, the court of King Arthur in Britain: Merlin the Court Magician casts a spell that allows him to equip the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns and drums of .45-caliber dumdums. Sir Galahad, the purest in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.”

“Fucking was how babies were made.”

“I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.”

“When a couple has an argument nowadays they may think it s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: "You are not enough people!”

“Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better then no drugs at all.”

“In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.”

“I'm a painter in my dreams, you know.”

“I wouldn't be a doctor for anything. That's the worst job.”

“Soft citizens of the American democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream. ”

“I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer.""What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”

“Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.”

“Ting-a-ling mother fucker.”

“Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved!”

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

“in nonsense is strength”

“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.”

“I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.”

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”

“The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were. ”

“Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.”

“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

“The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.”

“Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what ragedy so many had found to lament out of doors.”

“He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.”

“Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly.”

“Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.”

“There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive adn who was dead.The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.”

“Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just “evil” now. It’s completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.”

“I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.”

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

“Until you die .. it's all life.”