Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“A man without a home can’t be lost.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We’ve destroyed our planet.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow…” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Smoking is the only honorable form of suicide.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I want to stand 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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Be fruitful, and multiply.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I wish we had all been born birds instead.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“You become who you pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Don’t be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don’t put up with people that are reckless with yours.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.’”

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do no good, at least do no harm.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“This is a nation tragedy, of course – that we’ve changed from a society to an audience.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Everything about life is a joke. Don’t you know that?” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“No moral value is greater than humanity.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Science is magic that works.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughing is good exercise. It’s like jogging on the inside.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Everything is nothing, with a twist.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“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.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Love is where you find it.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Unannounced changes in life’s itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, “It is done.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut People did not like it here.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“All this happened, more or less.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt…” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“To be is to do – Socrates To do is to be – Sartre Do Be Do Be Do – Sinatra.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be – is actually who you are!” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The champagne was dead. So it goes.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut