Kurt Vonnegut citations

Page 6

“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.”

“If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.”

“You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”

“"I can't help it," I said. "My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things."
"You and your what?" he said.
"My soul and my meat," I said.
"They're separate?" he said.
"I sure hope they are," I said. I laughed. "I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does."”

“And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

“Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.”

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

“No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.”

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

“Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.”

“Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?"”

“Peculiar Travel Suggestions are Dancing Lessons From God”

“It may surprise you to learn that I take a certain pride, no matter how foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own decisions for my own reasons.”

“And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. … Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.”

“Which brings us to the arts, whose purpose, in common with astrology, is to use frauds in order to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on.”

“He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.”

“Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.”

“The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves—that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.”

“I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime.”

“It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.”

“All people are insane," he said. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

“If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.”

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

“To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.”

“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.”

“Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.”

“We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.”

“It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.”

“Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.”