Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

I remember one of them - it was a 1941 black Ford. As it went by very slow, a guy leaned out with a shotgun, keeping a bead on us all the time, and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us... They didn't kill us, but they didn't end it, either.

I have this dream where I get chased through a park by Nazis in the Second World War. They finally catch up to me in an apartment somewhere, but I don't know what happens next.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

If I'd known how wrong I was - if I'd had any idea of the awful night that lay ahead - I'd have run after him and never returned to that disgusting circus of blood, that revolting circus of death.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

There are men with guns up there. When they see me, they will kill me, if they can," I tell my father quietly. I search his eyes. "Should I let them?" He stares at me for a few seconds. "Go," he says, "and God help you.

For me, why would a Jew want to go anywhere in history ever? I'm only going to have to run.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

It's an odd feeling, knowing someone is trying to kill you. On the front line, you learn quickly that if you're in the path of a bullet, you will get hit.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.