Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

I don't really know what 'community' means. And I never use that word.

People lived in the same apartments for years. You'd meet a group of kids in kindergarten, and you'd still be with them in high school. No one ever left the neighborhood.

Community is like a big family.

There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.

The most profound question is, "What would I risk dying for?" The natural answer is "for my family." But for most of history, we didn't live in families. We lived in small communities that gave us our sense of safety and place in the world, so the natural answer would be "for my people." The blessing and the tragedy of modern life is that we don't need our community to survive anymore. When we lose that idea, we lose a sense of who we are.

The most important institution in society is the family. If the family breaks down, society breaks down.

Work with people who believe what you believe.

No social stability without individual stability.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind... life would have seemed to me empty.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right - we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.

Everybody's got somewhere they call home.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives but often a description of a community, organisation or nation.

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

People, wherever they are, can make a community.

Find like-minded people and try not to be individualized to the point where you try to fight it all and think about it all on your own.

I feel this is a family here, so kinda regardless of whatever happens in your life, you always can come home to the Grand Ole Opry, thank God.

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.

Every threat to the family is a threat to society itself.

To this day, at my relatively advanced age, I still don't have a place I can really call home. I've never bought property. I just move between temporary base camps. I know that the very notion of home, of having a family or community, is a hard one for me to embrace.