Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

You are pooped and demoralised,” read Dwayne. “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.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy.

The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.

I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

Never schedule a board meeting on Wednesday because it kills two weekends.

My ancestors were Freethinkers - and that's what I am, except we're called secular humanists now.

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

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting.

The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.

What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

[Ayres] was our city because we were building it. That's how I felt when I walked around town.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency."

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

In this world, you get what you pay for.

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.

For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.

Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

In the middle of Siberia I guess there's a lake that big [ like the Great Lakes], but there are practically no other lakes that big with fresh water.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

As a matter of social class Ku Klux Klan would have been regarded as white trash.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.

Out in the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nation functionaries and diplomats!

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.

Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.