Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

601 Sourced Quotes

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

Kurt Vonnegut
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

Kurt Vonnegut
Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.

Kurt Vonnegut
His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand — passive resistance and open displays of contempt.

Kurt Vonnegut
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Kurt Vonnegut
Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

Kurt Vonnegut
I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut
That's the attractive thing about war, said Rosewater. Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

Kurt Vonnegut
There's love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Kurt Vonnegut
"Strange business," said Lasher. "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."

Kurt Vonnegut
He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

Kurt Vonnegut
Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Kurt Vonnegut
Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

Kurt Vonnegut
I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

Kurt Vonnegut
The highest treason in the USA is to say Americans are not loved, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing there.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I was ever to have a child, this is what I'd tell it: 'Child,' I'd say, 'don't never mess with time. Keep now now and then then. And if you ever get lost in thick smoke, child, set still till it clears. Set still till you can see where you are and where you been and where you're going, child.

Kurt Vonnegut
I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.
"Yale," he said.
I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."
"I don't get it," he said.
"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."

Kurt Vonnegut
If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

Kurt Vonnegut
If somebody says 'I love you,' to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? 'I love you,.'

Kurt Vonnegut
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

Kurt Vonnegut
He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

Kurt Vonnegut
History is merely a list of surprises. … It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.

Kurt Vonnegut
The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

Kurt Vonnegut
His plan? To pass out weapons to slaves, so they could overthrow their masters. Suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut
You know what gets me? … How everybody says "fuck" and "shit" all the time. I used to be scared shitless if I'd say "fuck" or "shit" in public, by accident. Now everybody says "fuck" and "shit", "fuck" and "shit" all the time. Something very big must have happened while we were out of the country.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.

Kurt Vonnegut
She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

Kurt Vonnegut