1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm

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.

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

He ransacked his mind for something good to say, and found almost nothing. “My father gave me only two pieces of advice,” he said, “and only one of them has stood the test of time. They were: 'Don't touch your principal, and 'Keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom.

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?

Jesus of Nazareth told us to say these twelve words when we prayed: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' ... And for those words alone, he deserves to be called ;the Prince of Peace.

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

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.