Quotes by kurt vonnegut

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

“Here is a lesson in creative writing.First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.And I realiz...”

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn ...”

“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being...”

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

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

“What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.”

“Well finish your story anyway."Where was I?"The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we cou...”

“Anywaybecause we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about nextand how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything ...”

“The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists...”

“There's only one rule that I know of, babiesGod damn it, you've got to be kind.”

“I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.”

“Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the pe...”

“And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: "Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends ag...”

“Satan," he said, "couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored ...”

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”

“Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.”

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”

“What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still b...”

“But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of th...”