Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It always feel like people are doing more grown-up things than you are.

I always feel as if I'm a disappointment: that people want a grand dame in furs like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

I always feel like I'm missing out on something, that someone is having more fun than I am, so I take measures to make sure that is impossible.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too.

I remember when I was in high school I didn't have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.

I remember people - not my family - always asking, 'Oh, so are you going to make movies when you're older?' I felt pressured, and that always kind of deterred me.

I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: 'What are you getting? Is that all you're having? A salad? Oh, please.'

Girls in my school were always prettier.

We are bred to compare ourselves to the next person, to what they have and what they have accomplished.

Since I stayed in a colony where either one was an engineer or a scientist, everybody thought I would be a scientist. This was the expectation everybody had apart from my parents. Honestly, I, too, wanted to be a scientist. I think it was the way Dad would explain us scientific theories and concepts that made the subject more intriguing.

Like every girl, I felt amazing pressure to look like the popular girls, but no one told me the popular girls were all air brushed in magazines.

I really never thought about the way I looked until boys came into the picture. Then it starts to be like, 'Am I wearing the right outfit? I have to do my makeup for school!'

We live in a world of communication - everyone gets information about everyone else. There is universal comparison and you don't just compare yourself with the people next door, you compare yourself to people all over the world and with what is being presented as the decent, proper and dignified life. It's the crime of humiliation.

The surest route to breeding jealousy is to compare. Since jealousy comes from feeling less than another, comparisons only fan the fires.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

My character, Taylor McKessie, is a little bit brighter in the math and science department than I am... okay, a lot.

I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

I wouldn't get asked to dances because I wasn't as petite and cute as the other girls.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

It's so easy as a teen to feel like everybody is having this normal experience - except you. You're on the outside.

There's peer pressure of not being respected of having a certain amount of money, but if you know who you are, then you see that and look past it.

I think, very often, little girls look at these teen television shows and think, 'I have to have a boyfriend because Blair Waldorf has a boyfriend, and she's always fighting over boys!'