Kurt Vonnegut

“The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.”

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”

“Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?”

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

“All this happened, more or less.”

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

“Listen:”

“And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

“I want to stand 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.”

“In my prison cell i sitWith my britches full of $hitand my balls are bouncing gently on the floorand i see the bloody snagwhen she bit me in the bagoh, i'll never f--- a polack any more”

“The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.”

“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

“I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.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 tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup 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.”

“The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.”

“Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him alife not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. Thiswas a common combination on the planet Earth.”

“The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

“Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.”

“When the last living thingHas died on account of us,How poetical it would beIf Earth could say,In a voice floating upPerhapsFrom the floorOf the Grand Canyon,"It is done."People did not like it here.”

“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

“Be patient, Ophelia.Love,Hamlet”

“Well finish your story anyway."Where was I?"The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.And Father started giggling," Castle continued.He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?" asked Castle.Nope."'Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.”

“No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.”

“That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”

“Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.”

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC”

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely."Everything must have a purpose?" asked God."Certainly," said man."Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.And He went away.”

“I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”

“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.”

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

“Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.”

“I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.”

“See the cat? See the cradle?”

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

“And so it goes...”

“There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber.”

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.”

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”