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Time Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

162 Time quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

All Time quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s page

A soldier who lost a leg during the Civil War shows how time can carry loss across generations. Kurt Vonnegut’s quotes speak about people who are ahead of their era, about art as a future judge, and about treating a stranger’s time as a gift. They encourage making each moment count.

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“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

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“He developed several hobbies that helped him to pass the time.”

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All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

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There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can't anymore.

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“Here we are, traped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

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“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.”

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It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.

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“Quoth the doorbell with its silence, no comment at this time.”

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“It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and…

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There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.

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“At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody ... nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting.”

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Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you…

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She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

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That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

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“It is simply this. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs…

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Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

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In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium…

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“There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying…

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“What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.There is no beginning, no middle,…

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“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…It’s just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows…

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The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million…

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“I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be…

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Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of…

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Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters…

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A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story…

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“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still…

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“The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains,…

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“And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher,…

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“Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with…

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“How- how did I get here?" "It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining…

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“Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?" "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim.…

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“isn’t it time for your soul, which has been ashamed of your meat for so long, to thank your meat for finally…

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“So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back…

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“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of…

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“The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief. For…

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“The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the…

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“For many years I was the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was…

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“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still…

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“I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a…

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“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was…

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More by Kurt Vonnegut

“You must bloom as a writer and I must bloom as a painter. Everything else about us is uninteresting.”

“People aren't supposed to look back.”

“Have a good nap, did you?” said the porter. “Yes,” said Billy. “Man,” said the porter, “you sure had a hard-on.”

“I told him that if we doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in…

“Thomas Jefferson High School [..] His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on…

“I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it”

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

“The town was Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way.”

“Her face was one of a kind, a surprising variation that made observers think, Yes--that would be another very nice way for people to…

“You finally fell in love, I see,” said Salo. “Only an Earthling year ago,” said Constant. “It took us that long to realize that…

“Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a…

“And contrast Mary Kathleen, if you will, with my wife Ruth, the Ophelia of the death camps, who believed that even the most intelligent…

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if,…

“They were going back to the slaughterhouse for souvenirs of the war.”

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty…