Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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251. “The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

252. “In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

253. “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

254. “Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

255. “Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

256. “Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

257. “One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren’t a way to make a living.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

258. “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

259. “I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

260. “Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn’t everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

261. “You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

262. “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

263. “Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You’re sixteen, And ready for high school.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

264. “The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

265. “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

266. “In the water I am beautiful.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

267. “Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

268. “If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

269. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

270. “There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

271. “Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it’s you who should be doing the becoming. What you can become is the miracle you were born to work-not the damn fool computer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

272. “I am better now. Word of honour: I am better now.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

273. “The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

274. “Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

275. “There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

276. “Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

277. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

278. “Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

279. “It is time for me to be dead for a little while – and then live again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

280. “Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

281. “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

282. “A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

283. “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

284. “We’re not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

285. “Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

286. “In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

287. “To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

288. “I went to New York to be born again. And when the train plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

289. “Tis better to have love and lust Than to let our apparatus rust.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

290. “What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

291. “What’s going to happen is, very soon, we’re going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

292. “If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

293. “Evolution is so creative. That’s how we got giraffes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

294. “People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

295. “I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they’re still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

296. “Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

297. “War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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

— Kurt Vonnegut

299. “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

300. “The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren’t and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.”

— Kurt Vonnegut