Kurt Vonnegut: Likeness (page 2)

“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

Future

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Alcohol , Disease , Night

“Requiem:The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

People , Forgiveness , Sense

“Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.”

Kurt Vonnegut

As quoted in "The World according to Kurt" http://web.archive.org/web/20051018012956/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051011.wxvonnegut11/BNStory/Entertainment/ in Globe and Mail [Toronto] (11 October 2005)
Various interviews

Dogs , Way , Home , Cats

“Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is — from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd ever been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me.”

Kurt Vonnegut Happy Birthday, Wanda June

"Harold Ryan"
Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)

Hell

“Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America … We argued that is was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves — and yet it prescribed no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.
We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.
We thought it was more likely, though, that their framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves of composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.
Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives — which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.
Eliza and I … proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble, or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick

Source: Slapstick (1976), Ch. 6

People , World , Family , Beauty

“I know that millions of dollars have been spent to produce this splendid graduating class, and that the main hope of your teachers was, once they got through with you, that you would no longer be superstitious. I'm sorry — I have to undo that now. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty.
If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead. Then it might be all right to have babies again.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Bennington College address (1970)

God , Dreams , Hope , Teachers

““Look,” said Rumfoord, “life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster.” He turned to shiver his hands in her face. “All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure,” he said, “I can see the whole roller coaster you’re on. And sure—I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn’t help you any.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Beatrice.
“Because you’d still have to take the roller-coaster ride,” said Rumfoord. “I didn’t design the roller coaster, I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t. I just know what it’s shaped like.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 2 “Cheers in the Wirehouse” (pp. 57-58)

Life , Help , Personality

“Son—they say there isn’t any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 3 “United Hotcake Preferred” (p. 65; epigram)

Country

“Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

On Charley Warmergran, the Fire Chief of Rosewater.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

Truth

“Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Cold Turkey (2004)

Truth , Thinking

“They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Cold Turkey (2004)
Context: Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Christmas

““I liked him very much,” said Constant.
“The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms,” said Beatrice.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 41)