Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness - and some happiness, if you're lucky.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.

Most of life is sad.

What is life about? Two things: love and death.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.

Chacun de nous a un jour, plus ou moins triste, plus ou moins lointain, o u' il doit enfin accepter d'e" tre un homme. There will come a day for each of us, more or less sad, more or less distant, whenwe must accept the condition of being human.

I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.

Were all conning ourselves, one way or another, just to get through life.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

Happiness is not the portion of man.

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.

Life is an incurable condition: the only known treatment is to try to keep the patient comfortable.

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

The birth of a doubt that was once your belief is drowning in the tears that you cry.

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.