Kurt Vonnegut quotes - page 19

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. (Kurt Vonnegut)
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Take care of the people, and God Almighty will take care of Himself. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud! View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Men are jerks. Women are psychotic. (Kurt Vonnegut)
I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I've ever had, the only love I ever will have. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
My soul seemed a foul as smoke from burning cat fur. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
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. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world - in the form of bad ideas. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Any man can call time out but no man can say how long the time will be out. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope]. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I guess that's the test." "Barely - barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things - the people on the edge see them first. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Strange business," said Lasher. "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner's study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker's gray pinstripes, all separated here. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind." View quote
Kurt Vonnegut