1,579 Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.

The picture is supposed to go up just inside the front door, so it's the first thing you see when you come in. It's green. It's about the size of a barn door. It has one vertical orange stripe, and it's called 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony.' Mother wrote a letter to the paper, saying the picture was an insult to the memory of Father, and to the memory of every serious artist who ever lived.

Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

..."Papa" referred to Frank five times as: "...the blood son of Dr. Felix Hoenikker."The phrase reeked of cannibalism.

Yo no les puedo ofrecer más que una pequeña cosa a la que aferrarse, la verdad. No es mucho más que nada, y tal vez sea un poco peor que nada.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.