Kurt Vonnegut

“I think Willim Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.”

“There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.”

“Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.”

“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

“It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: 'Good-bye.”

“It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.”

“Life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way.”

“He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it.I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy?Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there.”

“He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy's mother 'dear' He was experimenting with calling everybody dear.”

“They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.”

“Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?" "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?""Yes." Billy, in fact had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it. "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

“Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again.”

“Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. 'We have a right to know what's going on!' she cried.”

“Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.”

“There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.”

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”

“Hazelina opsjednutost Hoosierima diljem svijeta klasičan je primjer lažnog karassa, prividne ekipe što nema nikakve veze s onime što i kako Bog radi, klasičan primjer onoga što Bokonon zove granfalloon. Drugi primjeri granfalloona su Komunistička partija, Kćeri američke revolucije, General Electric Company, International Order of Odd Fellows – bilo koja nacija, bilo kada, bilo gdje. Kako nas Bokonon poziva da pjevamo s njim:„Ako želiš znati što je granfalloonSamo zaviri u napuhani balon”

“A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:1492The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:[image]Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.Color was everything.Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”

“Forgive him- he knows not what he does.”

“Someday son all this will be yours. Father and son atop a garbage dump.”

“A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.”

“Enjoy the little things in life because one day you`ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

“American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though German fighters came up again made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America where factories were operating night and day dismantling the cylinders separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

“Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.”

“Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. 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.”

“The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.”

“There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war.”

“There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.”

“I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.”

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.”

“It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can't stand primitive people — they're so stupid.”

“...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.”

“The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically.”

“Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones - to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.”

“How’s the patient?” asked Derby.“Dead to the world.”“But not actually dead.”“No.”“How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”

“Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.”

“This was a pretty girl, except she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano...”

“Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, there, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.”

“Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute. So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?”

“I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.”

“Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.”

“Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.”

“Billy's smile as he came out of the shrubbery was at least as peculiar as Mona Lisa's, for he was simultaneously on foot in Germany in 1944 and riding his Cadillac in 1967.”

“I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

“My God-- life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?''Don't try,' he said. 'Just pretend you understand.''That's-- that's very good advice.' I went limp.”

“The driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.I wasn't a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: 'Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: "If this isn't nice, what is?”

“End of the world delight”