Kurt Vonnegut

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"There’s love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Make love when you can. It's good for you."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"”A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, 'It might have been.'"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"The primary benefit of practising any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."

- 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

"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

"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

"So it goes…"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK ."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"One might suspect that there are many things happening in the Universe, which he or her does not fully comprehend."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"To be is to do — Socrates. To do is to be — Jean-Paul Sartre. Do be do be do—Frank Sinatra."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but the living room…"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."

- Kurt Vonnegut

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

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. …"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.’"

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Never schedule a board meeting on Wednesday because it kills two weekends."

- Kurt Vonnegut

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

- Kurt Vonnegut