Mark Vonnegut Quotes

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.

Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.

Literacy has fueled most of the freedom movements in the last centuries.

I love to read because I know that for a long time ancestors weren't allowed to. I love to write. Because for a long time my people weren't 'allowed' to. So I'm going to write my books, my apps and tell my stories.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?" "The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

To read and write is a paradise.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

but you could also look at it the other way. Like you’re saying no matter how bad things are for you, I can still relate.

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.

Boycotts don't work. They work in certain isolated situations, where you have some potential. But in the main, the best way to bring about freedom in a society is to normalize, have tourism, have trade, have contact.

Face to face, just you and me, with no rules. Just like you, I get lonely too.

As long as we have books, we are not alone.

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

I write in order to belong.

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.