Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

The first thing you have to do is accept that decay sets in and there's nothing you can do about it.

I don't expect anything from anybody. When you grow old... Your days are gone; it is part of life.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

You can't be scared of death. When that time comes, it comes.

There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

The past is buried and I mourn it with greater pain than many among you, because no human power can awaken it when the Crown itself has scattered ashes upon the coffin.

I cannot compete with the grave.

When I was young, I used to be very frightened of getting older and of death. Now, I'm more resigned to the inevitability.

I don't fear death. If it happens, it was meant to happen.

SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE. EVERYTHING DIES IN THE END. I CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY? “I too cannot be cheated,” snapped Fate.

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.

little sun little moon little dog and a little to eat and a little to love and a little to live for in a little room filled with little mice who gnaw and dance and run while I sleep waiting for a little death in the middle of a little morning in a little city in a little state my little mother dead my little father dead in a little cemetery somewhere. I have only a little time to tell you this: watch out for little death when he comes running but like all the billions of little deaths it will finally mean nothing and everything: all your little tears burning like the dove, wasted.

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death.

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

Death is an absolute marvel.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

Birth was the death of him.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.