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Kurt Vonnegut

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Famous Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

“He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. "Hate to do this, Bill," he said of the fungi he was murdering. "Fungi have as much right to life as I do. they know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore." Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. "Bill," he said, "I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true." He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn't have done in a thousand years. Bill flew over to the windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. there was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trough was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode. "Your second wish is about to come true," said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. he opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside. Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. "That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of," he told the bird. "You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for--to get out of the cage.”

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Book:Breakfast Of Champions
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“Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. [...] He closed his eyes, and opened them again. He was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.”

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Book:SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
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“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead. The results had been catastrophic so far - suicide, theft, murder, and insanity and so on. But new chemicals were coming onto the market all the time.”

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Book:Breakfast Of Champions
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“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.”

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Book:A Man Without a Country
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“The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”

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Book:SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
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“And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero’s search for a father. It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be embarrassing. It’s simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father.”

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Book:Breakfast Of Champions
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“That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about.' And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it--have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.”

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Book:Galápagos
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“As she died, Mary was alone on the planet as were Dwayne Hoover or Kilgore Trout. She had never reproduced. There were no friends or relatives to watch her die. So she spoke her very last words on the planet to Cyprian Ukwende. She did not have enough breath left to make her vocal cords buzz. She could only move her lips noiselessly. Here is all she had to say about death: 'Oh my, oh my.' . . . Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small could of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away. Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dayne: 'Oh my, oh my." . . .”

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Author:Kurt Vonnegut
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“Billy miró el reloj que había sobre la cocina. Tenía que matar el tiempo durante una hora antes de que llegara el platillo. Se fue a la salita balanceando la botella como si fuera una campana, se sentó en una butaca y encendió el televisor. Entonces, tras haberse aislado ligeramente del tiempo, vio la última película, primero al revés, de fin a principio, y luego otra vez en sentido normal. Era una película sobre la actuación de los bombarderos americanos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sobre los valientes hombres que los tripulaban. Vista hacia atrás la historia era así: Aviones americanos llenos de agujeros, de hombres heridos y de cadáveres, despegaban de espaldas en un aeródromo de Inglaterra. Al sobrevolar Francia se encontraban con aviones alemanes de combate que volaban hacia atrás, aspirando balas y trozos de metralla de algunos aviones y dotaciones. Lo mismo se repitió con algunos aviones americanos destrozados en tierra, que alzaron el vuelo hacia atrás y se unieron a la formación. La formación volaba de espaldas hacia una ciudad alemana que era presa de las llamas. Cuando llegaron, los bombarderos abrieron sus escotillas y merced a un milagroso magnetismo redujeron el fuego, concentrándolo en unos cilindros de acero que aspiraron hasta hacerlos entrar en sus entrañas. Los containers fueron almacenados con todo cuidado en hileras. Pero allí abajo, los alemanes también tenían sus propios inventos milagrosos, consistentes en largos tubos de acero que utilizaron para succionar más balas y trozos de metralla de los aviones y de sus tripulantes. Pero todavía quedaban algunos heridos americanos, y algunos de los aviones estaban en mal estado. A pesar de ello, al sobrevolar Francia aparecieron nuevos aviones alemanes que solucionaron el conflicto. Y todo el mundo estuvo de nuevo sano y salvo. Cuando los bombarderos volvieron a sus bases, los cilindros de acero fueron sacados de sus estuches y devueltos en barcos a los Estados Unidos de América. Allí las fábricas funcionaban de día y de noche extrayendo el peligroso contenido de los recipientes. Lo conmovedor de la escena era que el trabajo lo realizaban, en su mayor parte, mujeres. Los minerales peligrosos eran enviados a especialistas que se encontraban en regiones lejanas. Su tarea consistía en enterrarlos y esconderlos bien para que así no volvieran a hacer daño a nadie. Los pilotos americanos mudaron sus uniformes para convertirse en muchachos que asistían a las escuelas superiores. Y Hitler se transformó en niño, según dedujo Billy Pilgrim. En la película no estaba. Porque Billy extrapolaba. Y se imaginó que todos se volvían niños, que toda la humanidad, sin excepción, conspiraba biológicamente para producir dos criaturas perfectas llamadas Adán y Eva.”

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Book:SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
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“That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[...]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death." Can you imagine that? Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”

Bluebeard
Author:Kurt Vonnegut
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“The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter. Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.”

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Book:SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
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“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

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Book:SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
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“Where was I?' 'The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.' 'Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people. 'And father started giggling,' Castle continued. 'He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvellous man said to me?' asked Castle. 'Nope.' '"Son," my father said to me, "someday this will all be yours.”

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Book:Cat's Cradle
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