Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut US novelist (1922 -2007)

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

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

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

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.

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

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 to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

Slaughterhouse Five

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

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

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

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

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

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

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

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

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.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

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.

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

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 universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

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

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.


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?