About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
Kurt Vonnegut

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
Kurt Vonnegut

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Kurt Vonnegut

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Kurt Vonnegut

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
Kurt Vonnegut

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

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut


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

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
Kurt Vonnegut

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Kurt Vonnegut

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Kurt Vonnegut

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut

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.
Kurt Vonnegut

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Kurt Vonnegut