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.
Any reviewer who
expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a
person who has put on full armour 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 centre.
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?
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