“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, quote from Timequake
“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“I never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“if there is a god, he sure hates people”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.
In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.
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 don't care about them. You are not alone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“They gave Pandora a box. Prometheus begged her not to open it. She opened it. Every evil to which human flesh is heir came out of it.
The last thing to come out of the box was hope. It flew away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“science never cheered up anyone. the human situation is just too awful.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don't do anything, don't suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“It was all here for me, just as it has all been here for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.
People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
“america...is the interplay of three hundred million rube goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Timequake
Kurt Vonnegut
Born place: in Indianapolis, Indiana, The United States
Born date November 11, 1922
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“As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out. Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck, and then you were hooked up by the arse with a wife.”
― Alan Sillitoe, quote from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
“Then there was the bhaiyyani next door, who Santosh started fucking two days after she got her first period and has been fucking steadily for five years, with the threat: “If you don’t allow me to fuck you I’ll kill you.” He climbs into her window when her drunk father is away, or passed out, and rapes her. There is nothing gentle about sexuality in the slum; it is furtive and feral. Once, a group of boys was spying on a couple asleep near the door of their room; the man had a hand on one of his wife’s breasts. Santosh reached in through the opening for the letterbox and started squeezing the wife’s other breast; she slept on, thinking that her husband was squeezing both. When she felt the extra pressure on one, she woke up and screamed but was too afraid to tell her husband what had happened. Much of what a woman in the slum puts up with she endures silently, because, as Sunil points out, “How can she tell the world what has been done to her?” They go after women who are vulnerable: the very young, the children or wives of drunkards, or women not right in the head. When their men discover what’s being done to them, they too most often keep it quiet. Who would want the world to know? What does it say about their manliness, that they were unable to protect their women? I”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“They had thought him such a 'good' man. They should have learned it was dangerous to trust appearances or take strangers at their word in this shit-hole world.”
― John Jakes, quote from Heaven and Hell
“He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something.”
― Gena Showalter, quote from The Darkest Secret
“There are no mistakes, Eden, just different outcomes to our flawed expectations.”
― Rachel Higginson, quote from Fearless Magic
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Sullivan's IslandBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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