Timequake Quotes

“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, 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, Jr., 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, Timequake

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Ting-a-ling mother fucker.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, 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, 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, Timequake

“Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”
― Kurt Vonnegut , 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, Timequake

“TV is an eraser.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, 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, Timequake

“if there is a god, he sure hates people”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“I never asked to be born in the first place.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, 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, 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, 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, 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, Timequake

“I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered am I.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“science never cheered up anyone. the human situation is just too awful.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, 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, 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, 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, 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, Timequake

“Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“They say the first thing to go when you're old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn't true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake