Kurt's Flight

"The only proof I needed for the existence of God was music."
Kurt Vonnegut November 11, 1922-April 10, 2007

I met Vonnegut when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, after he read to a packed auditorium, at the workshop post-reading party. Many of those post-reading parties were rife with shameless hustles by students and visiting writers for attention and publishing opportunities. Most of us went for the food and drink. We were hungry graduate students. I remember Vonnegut at the edge of the humming crowd, unmoved by adoration. He recognized the game. He was unpretentious. He came over and talked to me. He apologized for the way the people in this country treated Indians. Despite the images of violence that haunted him, Vonnegut remained in awe of creation. He was a real human being. We will miss him here.

Joy Harjo April 2007

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
Kurt Vonnegut

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
Kurt Vonnegut

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Kurt Vonnegut

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Kurt Vonnegut

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Kurt Vonnegut

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
Kurt Vonnegut

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
Kurt Vonnegut

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.
Kurt Vonnegut

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.
Kurt Vonnegut

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Kurt Vonnegut

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.
Kurt Vonnegut

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.
Kurt Vonnegut

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
Kurt Vonnegut

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
Kurt Vonnegut

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Kurt Vonnegut

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
Kurt Vonnegut

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.
Kurt Vonnegut

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Kurt Vonnegut

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut

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.
Kurt Vonnegut

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Kurt Vonnegut