Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

You can't even kill yourself if it isn't your time to go. People have no control whatsoever over what happens to them, and they are beginning to realize this. The future lies in the time of living. Your doing something will get you into tomorrow, if you want to call it tomorrow. If you want to make those distinctions at all.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.

Destiny's Champion, Fate's fool. Eternity's Soldier, Time's Tool.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

Each man's death is fated from the beginning of time.

Everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences.

Destiny ... a word which means more than we can find any definitions for. It is a word which can have no meaning in a mechanical universe: if that which is wound up must run down, what destiny is there in that? Destiny is not necessitarianism, and it is not caprice: it is something essentially meaningful. Each man has his destiny, though some men are undoubtedly "men of destiny" in a sense in which most men are not.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

I know that I'm here - I believe that I'm here for a purpose. I believe in forces of fate.

Everything always happens for a reason.

There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable. Everything has its reason for being: you only need to distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting.

A man crawls into a tomb to die. A boy crawls in to live. You think that's chance?

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.

in a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.

Every moment comes to you pregnant with divine purpose . . . . Once it leaves your hands and your power to do with it as you please, it plunges into eternity, to remain forever what you made it.

I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind.