Kurt Vonnegut was about as quotable a writer as ever there was. I think his passing merits an appreciation thread for his best quotes. Post your favorites, be they funny, sad, cynical or profound. I’ll start with two. The first is from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater which I think kind of distills his thinking and style:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
The second is from God Bless You, Dr. Kervorkian which I think is funny and which I think nails the psychology of scientists:
During my controlled near-death experiences, I’ve met Sir Isaac Newton, who died back in 1727 as often as I’ve met Saint Peter. They both hang out at the Heaven end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife. Saint Peter is there because it’s his job. Sir Isaac is there because of his insatiable curiosity about what the blue tunnel is, how the blue tunnel works. It isn’t enough for Newton that during his eighty-five years on Earth he invented calculus, codified and quantified the laws of gravity, motion and optics, and designed the first reflecting telescope. He can’t forgive himself for having left it to Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution, to Pasteur to come up with the germ theory, and to Albert Einstein to come up with relativity. “I must have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to have come up with those myself,” he said to me. “What could have been more obvious?”
Keep them coming.
I wish I were at home and had my books cause there are several I can’t google. In one he discusses his theory that Jesus’s comment to Judas “the poor you will have with you always” is one of the great misunderstood jokes in literature. He also discusses a fight in which his wife told him she no longer loved him and said (I’m paraphrasing) “and at that moment she didn’t and I knew and accepted that and it didn’t bother me because the time will come when she loves me again. I hope. Now if she had said she no longer respected me, we’d have divorced.” He goes on to say that he thinks Jesus’s adage to love your neighbor should read “respect your neighbor”, because the inability to love a stranger is natural and causes that verse to become dangerous.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.”
And, of course:
“If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”
Sorry for thread hogging- I’ll stop for a while after this one. It’s just KV rarely wrote a damned thing that wasn’t quotable.
Bokonon’s final sentence (and the one that breaks Kurt’s injunction to forget about the existence of the semi-colon):
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
“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.”
This quote absolutely delights because I am a 28 year old who writes part time for a living and I have no idea how to properly use a semicolon.
I wish I could remember which book of his I read this in, but the quote goes something like “Just because a person *can *reproduce, it doesn’t mean they should.”
I wish I could remember the measurements of KV’s own wang in Breakfast of Champions- something like 3 inches long and 9 inches in circumference as memory serves (the only one from all the wang measurements in the book that wasn’t believable numbers).