36 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Life

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on life

14. [When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

19. I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.

26. 'Things don't stay the way they are,' said Finnerty. 'It's too entertaining to try to change them.'

31. A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

34. 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 a little too phlegmatic.

38. I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

43. When you're dead you're dead.

50. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

57. Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

60. I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

65. Things die. All things die.

90. It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, 'What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,'I am here, I am here, I am here.'

94. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

95. There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

103. It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry - or laugh.

119. I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

120. What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

129. This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

134. Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.

135. I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

149. She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

152. How embarrassing to be human.

159. I don't care if I'm remembered or not when I'm dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, 'Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won't care what's happening to Jo. I won't care about anything. I'll be dead.')

160. All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

164. My first near-death experience was an accident, a botched anesthesia during a triple bypass. I had listened to several people on TV talk shows who had gone down the blue tunnel to the Pearly Gates, and even beyond the Pearly Gates, or so they said, and then come back to life again. But I certainly wouldn't have set out on such a risky expedition on purpose, without first having survived one ... To go through the Pearly Gates, no matter how tempting the interviewee on the other side, as I myself discovered the hard way, is to run the risk that crotchety Saint Peter, depending on his mood, may never let you out again. Think of how heartbroken your friends and relatives would be if, by going through the Pearly Gates to talk to Napoleon, say, you in effect committed suicide.

166. I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, 'Isaac is up in Heaven now.' That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored. I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience - the accidental one. So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, 'He's up in Heaven now.' Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this. My epitaph in any case? 'Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.' I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.

171. I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

184. I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

191. My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'

214. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

218. Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be.

222. Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

228. It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

230. The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

233. We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

234. 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.