Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.

Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.

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

Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.

I would have been dead if it weren't for that great gift to civilization from the Chemistry Department of Harvard, which was napalm, or sticky jellied gasoline.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

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.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

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.

...Skyscraper National Park

Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

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

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

No art is possible without a dance with death.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing..."John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

All this happened, more or less.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.