Kurt Vonnegut

“Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”

“I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:Player Piano BThe Sirens of Titan AMother Night ACat’s Cradle A-plusGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ASlaughterhouse-Five A-plusWelcome to the Monkey House B-minusHappy Birthday, Wanda June DBreakfast of Champions CWampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons CSlapstick DJailbird APalm Sunday C”

“I’m going to lose weight for you,” she [Valencia Merble] said.“What?”“I’m going to go on a diet. I’m going to become beautiful for you.”“I like you just the way you are.”“Do you really?”“Really,” said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-travel, and knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.”

“A minute ago you said something about Jesus.''Who?''Jesus Christ?''Oh. him.' He shrugged.'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.”

“Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.”

“Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.”

“Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.”

“Life goes on- and a fool and his self respect are soon parted...”

“Maturity, Bokonon tells us, is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists”

“Take care of the people, and god almighty will take care of himself.”

“I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago. I suspect that this is something most white Americans and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.”

“And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.”

“You were sick, but now you are well, and there is work to be done.”

“The function of art is to make people like life more than they do.”

“That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality. Quoth Mandarax:Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper! - GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS”

“What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?' This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robotwho had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what madethe story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespreaduse of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had noconscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening tothe people on the ground. Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on,and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline onpeople. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he waswelcomed to the human race.”

“At least forty million Americans can't read and write, according to this morning's New York Times. That is six times as many illiterates as there are people of Armenian descent anywhere! So many of them and so few of us!”

“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”

“I'd rather have written 'Cheers' than anything I've written.”

“There was more. There was always more.”

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

“Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.”

“Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.”

“The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.”

“El arte no es posible si no baila como pareja de la muerte, decía.”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“It was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.”

“Nous esperons que notre grand-père vivra encore longtemps.”

“It's nice to be nice.”

“Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana’s body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed.”

“And so on. It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.”

“It would sound like a dream,” said Billy. “Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting usually.”

“How embarrassing it is to be human.”

“Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.”

“Earth was green and watery. The air of the Earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream. The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart. Earth was warm. The surface of the Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.”

“Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from past experience what this meant: He was being stupid. 'Would-would you mind telling me,' he said to the guide, much deflated, 'what was so stupid about that?' 'We know how the Universe ends,' said the guide, 'and Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too.' 'How-how does the Universe end?' said Billy. 'We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.' So it goes.”

“I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.”

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

“There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind.”

“He would make a good lamp post if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat.”

“He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension.”

“Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.”

“Guns and women can make an atom bombing look like an ice cream social.”

“and what sunshine are you going to bring into our lives today? Shall we poison the well or burn the house down?”

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.”

“Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything.”

“This here’s a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?”

“The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”

“Oh, God — the lives people try to lead.Oh, God — what a world they try to lead them in.”

“What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.”