Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions (1973)

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The prostitutes worked for a pimp now. He was splendid and cruel. He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn't want it anyway. It was as though they had surrendered themselves to Jesus, for instance, so they could live unselfishly and trustingly-except that they had surrendered to a pimp instead.

Kurt Vonnegut
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut
He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

Kurt Vonnegut
Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

Kurt Vonnegut
Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You're sixteen
And ready for high school.

Kurt Vonnegut
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

Kurt Vonnegut
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Kurt Vonnegut
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

Kurt Vonnegut
I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.
Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.
What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:
This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this:
What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.
And so on.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

Kurt Vonnegut
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

Kurt Vonnegut
Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Kurt Vonnegut
To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.

Kurt Vonnegut
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
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
Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.

Kurt Vonnegut
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.

Kurt Vonnegut
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut
Hey — guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?

Kurt Vonnegut