Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Society is more concerned with material possessions than it is with the true love and compassion of another human being.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.”
― Philip José Farmer

“Here's all she had to say about death: "Oh my, oh my.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“A walk?" said Catharine.
"One foot in front of the other," said Newt, "through leaves, over bridges---”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too over optimistic.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Poput tolikih patoloških ličnosti koje su prije milijun godina bile od moći, mogao je učiniti gotovo sve prepuštajući se trenutačnom porivu i ne osjećajući gotovo ništa. Logička objašnjenja za njegova djela, izmišljena u dokolici, uvijek su dolazila kasnije.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“She was so far from imagining what I might want that she did not even get out of the doorway so I could come inside. I wanted to get into my bed and pull the covers over my head. That was my plan. That is still pretty much my plan.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“The community was to be ashamed of nothing. Father was to be ashamed of everything. My father, the master of so many grand gestures and attitudes, turned out to be as collapsible as a paper cup.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“How pathetic they would have found it, if only they had known, that I had been told that I should become a writer, that I had the divine spark, by a high school English teacher who had never been anywhere, either, who had never seen anything important, either, who had no sex life, either. And what a perfect name she had for a role like that: Naomi Shoup.

She took pity on me, and on herself, too, I’m sure. What awful lives we had! She was old and alone, and considered to be ridiculous for finding joy on a printed page.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“Yes—he has the deepest voice in the world, but have you ever listened to what he actually says when he’s using his own mind, when some genuinely gifted person hasn’t written something for him to say?”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“So I become a pharmacist. But I never gave up on being a writer, too, although I stopped talking about it. I cut poor old Naomi Shoup dead the next time she dared mention my divine spark to me. I told her that I had no wish to be distracted from my first love, which was pharmacy. Thus was I without a single friend in this world again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“For all his rough and ready manners, Pefko, like so many professional soldiers, turned out to have an almond macaroon for a heart. He agreed.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“And guess what? You’ve seen that fence with the watchtowers. Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“I suppose that’s really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“Bernard Ketchum told us about one of Plato’s dialogues, in which an old man is asked how it felt not to be excited by sex anymore. The old man replies that it was like being allowed to dismount from a wild horse.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“He declared that the most important arts centers a city could have were human beings, not buildings. He called attention to me again. “There in the back sits an arts center named ‘Rudy Waltz,’ ” he said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“The late twentieth century will go down in history, I’m sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery. My own brother came home from New York City—bombed on Darvon and Ritalin and methaqualone and Valium, and God only knows what all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“It’s interesting that he didn’t mention Celia for this reason: He would later declare, under the influence of drugs a doctor had prescribed for him, that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and that he should have married her.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“It is virtually impossible to harm a Timex watch. For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“That is the second story I have told about Celia which ends with her fleeing barefoot. History repeats itself.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick

“That’s it!” Charlie said, pausing the audiobook. “I knew there was something in this book I needed to remember. Billy Pilgrim is saying that the most important thing he learned is that it only appears that we’re dead at the time of our death and that all moments—past, present, and future—have always existed. He says that it’s only an illusion ‘that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string.’ What he’s saying is that even though the moments in our lives pass, they still exist and always will.”
Charlie continued, “It reminds me of what Robert Lanza said in Biocentrism—that death is an illusion, and there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life that are not arranged in a linear fashion. What if those ‘now’ moments are like the still frames of a stop-motion picture—they only appear to be moving because they’re played rapidly in sequence, but the individual frames are inanimate? Then, the individual frames—the ‘now’ moments in someone’s life— are like the individual beads on a string, separated only by the smallest unit of length, the Planck length. If you removed the string, the individual beads—all the ‘now’ moments in a person’s life—would float around the person like bubbles in the air but remain connected to that person through quantum entanglement.”
Chris listened intently.
“If that were the case,” Charlie said, “then one of our bubbles—one of our ‘now’ moments—would be us driving in this car right now, and another bubble would be when you, Isaac, and I were hiking to the teahouse in Canada, and still another bubble would be the moment Isaac died. If you remember, Robert Lanza said that our bodies die at the moment we call death, but our consciousness only moves from one ‘now’ moment to another. What Kurt Vonnegut is saying is similar . . . that a person is in bad shape at the time of death, but he’s perfectly fine in so many other moments. They’re both saying death is not the end— that there are an infinite number of ‘now’ moments in a person’s life.”
“I remember you telling me that Allison said time was different on the other side,” Chris added. “I wonder if our bubbles that surround us, our ‘now’ moments—the past, present, and future—which all exist simultaneously and forever, would explain why mediums can see into the past and future. Those ‘now’ moments would be no further away from us than the present.”
“Good point!” Charlie said. “I didn’t think of that. Apparently, Robert Lanza, Allison, and Kurt Vonnegut are saying similar things, but from very different angles.”
― Charlie Bynar, Through the Darkness: A Story of Love from the Other Side