Top 40 Mark Vonnegut Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We’re here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

— Mark Vonnegut

2. “Knowing that you’re crazy doesn’t make the crazy things stop happening.”

— Mark Vonnegut

3. “Short time here, long time gone. The reason to try to be good, smart, kind, and on the side of angels is because it’s more fun and because there really aren’t any angels.”

— Mark Vonnegut

4. “I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.”

— Mark Vonnegut

5. “Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”

— Mark Vonnegut

6. “Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts...”

— Mark Vonnegut

7. “None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.”

— Mark Vonnegut

8. “With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.”

— Mark Vonnegut

9. “And if you’re lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, ‘How all right can he be?’”

— Mark Vonnegut

10. “The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service.”

— Mark Vonnegut

11. “Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you’re stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.”

— Mark Vonnegut

12. “At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do – plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.”

— Mark Vonnegut

13. “Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?”

— Mark Vonnegut

14. “None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick. At my best I have islands of being sick. At my worst I had islands of being well. Except for a reluctance to give up on myself there isn’t anything I can claim credit for that helped me recover from my breaks. Even that doesn’t count. You either have or don’t have a reluctance to give up on yourself. It helps a lot if others don’t give up on you. Had.”

— Mark Vonnegut

15. “Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.”

— Mark Vonnegut

16. “At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife’s barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, “It was enough to have been a unicorn.” What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn’t have to be just another goat or horse.”

— Mark Vonnegut

17. “The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.”

— Mark Vonnegut

18. “I didn’t like the ’60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.”

— Mark Vonnegut

19. “Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.”

— Mark Vonnegut

20. “Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.”

— Mark Vonnegut

21. “But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.”

— Mark Vonnegut

22. “My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.”

— Mark Vonnegut

23. “Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths. Folk.”

— Mark Vonnegut

24. “It’s regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.”

— Mark Vonnegut

25. “Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.”

— Mark Vonnegut

26. “Once you’ve been talked to by voices, it’s not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.”

— Mark Vonnegut

27. “Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.”

— Mark Vonnegut

28. “As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.”

— Mark Vonnegut

29. “I’m willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.”

— Mark Vonnegut

30. “Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”

— Mark Vonnegut

31. “In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn’t useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn’t make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.”

— Mark Vonnegut

32. “For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff “crazy” would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it.”

— Mark Vonnegut

33. “My only hope was to be polite.”

— Mark Vonnegut

34. “I’m subject to occasional theological nightmares. The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I’m asked is where I went to college.”

— Mark Vonnegut

35. “Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct – the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.”

— Mark Vonnegut

36. “Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.”

— Mark Vonnegut

37. “Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we’re all blowing smoke and don’t know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.”

— Mark Vonnegut

38. “After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.”

— Mark Vonnegut

39. “Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.”

— Mark Vonnegut

40. “Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.”

— Mark Vonnegut

41. “Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.”

— Mark Vonnegut

42. “There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look.”

— Mark Vonnegut

43. “Today it’s nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won’t make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won’t make you well.”

— Mark Vonnegut

44. “I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms – it’s to frighten off extroverts.”

— Mark Vonnegut