Top 1030 Quotes & Sayings by Kurt Vonnegut - Page 16

I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?

The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

A man without a home can't be lost.

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

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

The big show is inside my head.

I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.

No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.

The Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they'd send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they'd run our stories. So that's what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers - joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.

If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.

The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

In the water I am beautiful.

I want a military funeral when I die?the bugler, the flag on the casket, the ceremonial firing squad, the hallowed ground.... It will be a way of achieving what I've always wanted more than anything?something I could have had, if only I'd managed to get myself killed in the war.... The unqualified approval of my community.

People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.

Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

I don't reveal to her that I love her. I keep poker faced. She might as well be looking at a cantaloupe, there is so little information in my face, but my heart is beating.

[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.

It is never a mistake to say good-bye.

All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.

Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo

The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

With words alone, Gail Godwin has created an important piece of music about a love which death can only increase and deepen. Yes, and Frances Halsband's illustrations are a haunting countermelody.

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.

What good is a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man. They don't make memories like that anymore

Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.

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

The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.

Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.

Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.

You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be - is actually who you are!

What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for an Edenic continent stretching forever in all directions. Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.

Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that?

If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.