Kurt Vonnegut

“There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.Look at it go!”

“Oh, a sleeping drunkardUp in Central Park,And a lion-hunterIn 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 peopleIn the same device.”

“Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before. I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!"She jerked her head away from the eyepiece."Hello," I said."You scared me to death," she said."Sorry," I said, and I laughed.These ancient games go on and on. It's nice they do.”

“Everything is going to be unimaginably worse and is never going to get any better.”

“TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

“Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last.”

“Ben understood at last that money was one big dragon, with a billion dollars for a head, and a penny on the tip of its tail. It had as many voices as there were men and women, and it captured all who were fools enough to listen to it all the time.”

“If "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had come off as planned, the division of duties would have been typical of the management of so many organizations a million years ago, with the nominal leader specializing in sociable balderdash, and with the supposed second-in-command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked, and what was really going on.”

“The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.”

“Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo”

“The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a village idiot who was explaining that he didn't know anything about anything.”

“Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.”

“It will be your generation that will grow up in the glorious new era when people will be as easily graded as oranges.”

“All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.”

“A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit.”

“This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.”

“It is never a mistake to say good-bye.”

“Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.”

“Sorry," said Salo."I would say, 'Is there anything I can do?'- but Skip once told me that that was the most hateful and stupid expression in the English language.”

“I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don't matter anymore.”

“I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

“Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn’t had even one baby yet. She used birth control. "Of course it happened," Trout told her. "If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s fraud."Maggie believed him. "I'd never thought about that before.""Think about it now.""It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.""Exactly. The same body of law applies.""Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?""I put everything that happens to me in books.""I guess I better be careful what I say.""That’s right. And I'm not the only one who's listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he's going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they're bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you'll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting."Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified. Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie's cleavage.”

“God never wrote a good play in his life.”

“Everything is nothing, with a twist.”

“So it goes."Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn't notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There's a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to.”

“Un paranoico è una persona che è impazzita nel modo più intelligente e ben informato, il mondo essendo quel che è”

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.”

“His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.”

“You'll pardon me," said Beatrice, "if I fail to appreciate sarcasm and all the other brilliant nuances of your no doubt famous wit, Mr. Constant[...]”

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

“Society is more concerned with material possessions than it is with the true love and compassion of another human being.”

“When you're dead you're dead.”

“Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.”

“This country," said Eliot, "had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country's dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn't a scientist, and they didn't need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.""Uh huh," said the Senator. He couldn't stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. "He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?""No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

“Happiness is not a destination it is a way of life.”

“All men are jerks, all women are psychotic.”

“It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.”

“It was all here for me, just as it has all been here for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”

“Forse essere infelice le piace così tanto che preferisce non far nulla per cambiare”

“Quello che avrebbe visto negli occhi celestiali di Francine, lo sapeva, sarebbe stato il più meschino di tutti i sentimenti positivi, che è il rispetto.”

“Give me knowledge or give me death.”

“What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.”

“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

“Forse, quando commemoriamo la guerra, dovremmo toglierci i vestiti e dipingerci di blu e camminare per tutto il giorno a quattro zampe grufolando come maiali. questo sarebbe indubbiamente più appropriato di qualsiasi nobile discorso e sventolio di bandiere e present'arm coi fucili ben oliati.”

“Come ci dice Bokonon: "Non si sbaglia mai dicendo addio".”

“La maturità," ci dice Bokonon, "è un'amara delusione per la quale non esiste rimedio, a meno che la risata non possa essere considerata un rimedio a qualcosa.”

“Il dottor Hoenikker soleva dire che qualunque scienziato non fosse in grado di spiegare quello che stava facendo a un bambino di otto anni, era un ciarlatano.”

“Aveva un sorriso forzato e si stava scervellando per trovare qualcosa da dire, senza rinvenire altro nella sua povera zucca che Kleenex usati e pezzi di bigiotteria.”

“And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one ... I'm out of here.”