Kurt Vonnegut citations

Page 9

“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.”

“He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.”

“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.”

““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.”

“Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent shape to afford integrity.”

“If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.”

“I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.
"Yale," he said.
I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."
"I don't get it," he said.
"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."”

“Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?”

“This silly playlet seemed to satisfy them completely as a picture of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who was against them, and why some people were against them. It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.”

“The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.”

“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

“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.”

“Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.”

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

“You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.”

“Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.”

“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

“Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”

“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.”

“[Freedom of speech] isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you give to yourself.”

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

“They're playin our song Gene!”

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

“When I was a naive young recruit in Spain, I used to wonder why soldiers bayoneted oil paintings, shot the noses off statues and defecated into grand pianos. I now understand: it was to teach civilians the deepest sort of respect for men in uniform — uncontrollable fear.”

“I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union and so on.
“I paid my dues with everyone else,” he said.
It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.”
Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I beg your pardon,” or “Excuse Me.””

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. There is evil for you. We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly evil wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

“He held up his watch to sunlight, letting it drink in the wherewithal that was to solar watches what money was to Earth men.”

“I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.”

“This script, it seems to me, is the work of professionals who yearned to be as charming as inspired amateurs can sometimes be.”