Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions (1973)

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There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Kurt Vonnegut
Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.

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

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
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.

Kurt Vonnegut
It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says,'I am here, I am here, I am here.'"

Kurt Vonnegut
I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions.

Kurt Vonnegut
Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?"

Kurt Vonnegut
Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved!

Kurt Vonnegut
Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

Kurt Vonnegut
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

Kurt Vonnegut
Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Kurt Vonnegut
Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut
What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.

Kurt Vonnegut
The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.

Kurt Vonnegut
Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.

Kurt Vonnegut
It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Kurt Vonnegut
We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

Kurt Vonnegut
Listen:
The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
"The big show is inside my head," I said

Kurt Vonnegut
You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.

Kurt Vonnegut
Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

Kurt Vonnegut
Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.

Kurt Vonnegut
Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"

Kurt Vonnegut
The slaves were simply turned loose without any property. They were easily recognizable. They were black. They were suddenly free to go exploring.

Kurt Vonnegut
Humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

Kurt Vonnegut
Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

Kurt Vonnegut
This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof — having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly — to insult The Star-Spangled Banner, to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen.

Kurt Vonnegut
Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

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
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

Kurt Vonnegut