Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. It is to create something that will.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death. We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

I'd rather die than fade away

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

The only greatness for man is immortality.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

However and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die.

The last thing I want is to die and then be put into the Hall of Fame. It's not because I won't be there to enjoy it, exactly. It's because I want to enjoy it with family and friends and fans. I want to see them enjoy it.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

I hope that on my tombstone it says 'Born 1933, died 2043.' I hope that's my legacy.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.