Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.”

“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.”

“Im wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.”

“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people dont acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”

“The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasnt really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasnt going to compose Beethovens Fifth.”

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!”

“High School is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.”

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

“I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”

“Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people.”

“We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You dont even have to as a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.”

“If people think nature is their friend, then they sure dont need an enemy.”

“People dont come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.”

“Thinking doesnt seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.”

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

“Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”

“It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big.”

“Only those who are ready to become nobodies are able to love.”

“Well, to admire the hell out of Jesus Christ or of everyone who speaks well. And, well my grandfather said is-- if-- what Jesus said was marvelous. What does it matter whether he was God or not? And it doesnt matter. So this is a human being who spoke extremely well, and we humanists listened.”