Kurt Vonnegut

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.

Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.

Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

Unannounced changes in life's itinerary are like dancing lessons from God.

We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.

They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.