Kurt Vonnegut - Life Quotes

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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
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
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
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
You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again, and your father is always in your head when that stuff happens. Writing, most of the time, for most people, is an accident and your father is there for that, too. You know, I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work. Your father won't let it happen.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Kurt Vonnegut
In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

Kurt Vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

Kurt Vonnegut
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
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
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
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
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
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away — even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Kurt Vonnegut
How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Kurt Vonnegut
The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

Kurt Vonnegut
No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.

Kurt Vonnegut
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

Kurt Vonnegut
During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war — production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.

Kurt Vonnegut
Life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster. All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure, I can see the whole roller coaster you're on. And sure — I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any. Because you'd still have to take the roller-coaster ride, I didn't design the roller coaster, I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like.

Kurt Vonnegut
In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.

Kurt Vonnegut
There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life...

Kurt Vonnegut
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
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
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
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
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Kurt Vonnegut