Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut -
Life
Quotes
49 Sourced Quotes
View all Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
Source
Report...
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: 'he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.'
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he'd been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, 'Oh, I imagine.' I've always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life...
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. 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.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry — or laugh.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I can't tell if you're serious or not,' said the driver. I won't know myself until I find out if life is serious or not,' said Trout. 'It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
We'd been apart so long—I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
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.
Kurt Vonnegut
Source
Report...
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Kurt Vonnegut
1
2
Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Kurt Vonnegut
Creative Commons
Born:
November 11, 1922
Died:
April 11, 2007
(aged 84)
More about Kurt Vonnegut...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes