Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

The big show is inside my head.

I couldn’t help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

In nonsense is strength.

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.

The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The nicest veterans...the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.