74 Quotes by Mark Vonnegut

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms -- it's to frighten off extroverts.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.

We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.