Quotes by kurt vonnegut

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us...”

“Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat f...”

“I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that perso...”

“I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment”

“what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations”

“The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.”

“I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trouts novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long a...”

“Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself”

“Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.”

“Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.”

“Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.”

“He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and som...”

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

“There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one afte...”

“The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and...”

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.”

“The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or cloud, at a st...”

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvar...”

“A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to ...”