Mark Vonnegut Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Mark Vonnegut
As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

Mark Vonnegut
And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

Mark Vonnegut
Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

Mark Vonnegut
My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

Mark Vonnegut
Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.

Mark Vonnegut
Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something....

Mark Vonnegut
Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.

Mark Vonnegut
Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

Mark Vonnegut
When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?". At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?". I wish I knew.

Mark Vonnegut
Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

Mark Vonnegut
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

Mark Vonnegut
Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.

Mark Vonnegut
Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow responsible.

Mark Vonnegut
It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

Mark Vonnegut
None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.

Mark Vonnegut
Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

Mark Vonnegut
Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

Mark Vonnegut
The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.

Mark Vonnegut