Kurt Vonnegut

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.” (Pg 18)

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” (Pg 41)

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” (Pg 63)

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone cold dead.” (Pg 68)

“Americans are always searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.” (Pg 97)

“The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. She tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.” (Pg 98)

“I wanted all things

To seem to make sense,

So we could all be happy, yes,

Instead of tense

And I made up lies

So that they fit all nice,

And I made this sad world

A par-a-dise.” (Pg 127)

“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?” (Pg 153)

“Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.” (Pg 198)

“MAKE RELIGION LIVE!” (Pg 215)

“When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.” (Pg 231)

“Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?” (Pg 237)

“What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing. “ (Pg 245)

“Each one of us has to be what he or she is.” (Pg 267)

Slaughter-House Five - Kurt Vonnegut

“What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.” (Pg 3)

“We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” (Pg 18)

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.” (Pg 19)

“I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction.” (Pg 21)

“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.” (Pg 27)

“There’s more to life than what you read in books.” (Pg 38)

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” (Pg 86)

“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.” (Pg 103)

“We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments.” (Pg 117)

“It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while – and then live again.” (Pg 142-143)

“Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see.” (Pg 193)

“That was one of the things about the end of the war: Absolutely anybody who wanted a weapon could have one.” (Pg 195)

“Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does.” (Pg 198)

“If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still – if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.” (Pg 211)