Kurt Vonnegut citations

Page 4

“C'est évidemment une chose éreintante que d'avoir sans cesse à raisonner dans un univers qui n'a jamais été fait pour être raisonnable.”

“Tout temps est le temps du tout. Il est inaltérable. Il ne se prête ni aux avertissements ni aux raisonnement. Il existe, un point c'est tout.”

“Ce n'est pas parce qu'une chose paraît meilleure qu'une autre qu'elle est bonne pour vous.”

“Tout ce que vous pensez, vous le pensez parce que quelqu'un en a lancé l'idée.”

“Le charme est un truc qui fait que des étrangers apprécient immédiatement quelqu'un et lui font confiance - indépendamment de tout ce que ce charmeur peut avoir en tête.”

“Certains des gens les plus malheureux en ce monde sont aussi parmi les plus intelligents.”

“Le monde moderne se coincerait en grinçant s'il n'existait pas d'hommes assez doués et compétents pour faire fonctionner en douceur les éléments les plus complexes de la civilisation.”

“Le mot pourquoi ne veut rien dire.”

“Personne n'aime à penser qu'on se sert de lui.”

“On ne se trompe jamais en disant au revoir.”

“La force est dans l'absurdité.”

“Les fous, parfois, ne sont pas dépourvus de charme.”

“Quiconque cesse de tirer fierté de son apparence physique ne tarde pas à mourir.”

“Un jeune garçon ne peut pas se passer de son père.”

“Si les souhaits avaient des jambes, tous les crève-la-faim rouleraient carrosse.”

“Chacun de nous doit être ce qu'il ou elle est.”

“Les idées ou l'absence d'idées sont des causes de maladie.”

“La science est une magie qui réussit.”

“Ce n'est pas la taille qui fait qu'un homme est un merdeur, c'est sa façon de penser.”

“Les matériaux qu'un écrivain est appelé à manipuler sont de nature si dangereuse qu'il peut s'attendre à se retrouver à l'agonie en un tournemain s'il ne tient pas sur ses gardes.”

“Les hommes, apparemment par nature, ne peuvent être heureux que lorsqu'ils sont engagés dans des entreprises qui leur font prendre conscience de leur utilité.”

“Les idées vous viennent toujours quand on veut demander quelque chose.”

“Ce n'est qu'une illusion terrestre de croire que les minutes se succèdent comme les grains d'un chapelet et que, une fois disparues, elles le sont pour de bon.”

“Le sexe a encore le pouvoir d'abattre toutes sortes de structures sociales.”

“L'univers, c'est un marché aux puces où chaque objet est surestimé.”

“On peut tout supporter et chacun doit accomplir ce qui lui échoit.”

“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”

“I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency."”

“Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.”

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”

“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.”

“We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show.”

“The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."”

“The controls were anything but a hunch-player’s delight in a Universe composed of one-trillionth part matter to one decillion parts black velvet futility.”

“A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.”

“Things die. All things die.”

“I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.”

“One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.”

“I don't care if I'm remembered or not when I'm dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, "Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won't care what's happening to Jo. I won't care about anything. I'll be dead.")”

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

“Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.
The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my one-time hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.
My stolen answer to Nixon was this: "Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir."”

“Hey — guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?”

“These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.”

“Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant’s father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.”

“My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."”

“I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”

“The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.”

“Dear Reader: The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat's Cradle. A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I've written, a few of the speeches I made.”

“The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology—a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.”

“I hadn't aimed at anything. If I had thought of the bullet's hitting anything, I don't remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit. The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood. Why didn't I use a blank cartridge? What kind of a symbol would that have been?”

“We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party.”

“I think yet again of my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He has reason to be optimistic about his new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still or portraits or landscapes, were full of pow. Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: "That's really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is finish it." He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called "Special Agent". When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man.
When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead. This was terrible.”

“I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.”

“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?””