Collecting Vonnegut quotes today. Read ‘em all. It’s worth it.
First this exchange from "Sirens of Titan"
"I guess somebody up there likes me."
"What makes you think anyone up there is remotely interested in you?"
More:
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
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.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
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.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.
Whenever you’re in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob.
The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
What is the purpose of life? Kilgore Trout’s answer:
To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.
Kilgore Trout’s epitaph: We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
"Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!"
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.
Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.
As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
And finally:
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Please- add your own.