Quotes from Kurt Vonnegut

That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.

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.

If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

Vonnegut could not help looking back, despite the danger of being turned metaphorically into a pillar of salt, into am emblem of the death that comes to those who cannot let go of the past

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

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

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

The youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation.

It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we'd be talking in the halls about what we just learned.

Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie.

My father said, 'When in doubt, castle.'

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind.

Jack Benny, Fred Allen. Their jokes were wonderful. It takes skill to be funny. The timing of Jack Benny was so fine. It is a form of genius for which we should be grateful.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.