# Breakfast of Champions - Author: [Kurt Vonnegut](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut.md) - Quotes: 24 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions ## Quotes > Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/like-most-science-fiction.md) > Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/our-awareness-is-all.md) > Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind. p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/charm-was-a-scheme.md) > Listen: > > The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. > > "The big show is inside my head," I said [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/listen-the-waitress.md) > Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. > > The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/here-is-how.md) > He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/he-was-a-graduate.md) > We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/we-are-healthy.md) > Hey — guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/hey-guess-what.md) > Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?" [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/trout-trudged-onward.md) > It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says, 'I am here, I am here, I am here.'" [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/it-was-trouts.md) > Roses are red > > And ready for plucking > > You're sixteen > > And ready for high school. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/roses-are-red.md) > I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again. > > Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this:What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.And so on.Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/i-was-on-par.md) > Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/let-us-devote.md) > This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/this-is-a-tale.md) > What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/what-do-i-myself.md) > Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!" [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/here-was-what.md) > I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales.And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/i-thought-beatrice.md) > To be > > the eyes > > and ears > > and conscience > > of the Creator of the Universe, > > you fool. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/to-be-the.md) > You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/you-are-pooped.md) > This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof — having ascended one slope.I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly — to insult "The Star-Spangled Banner," to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there — the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes — there is a picture in this book of underpants. I'm throwing out characters from my other books, too. I'm not going to put on any more puppet shows.I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore.So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. > > What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.And all music is. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/this-book-is-my-fiftieth-birthday.md) > A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk. > > In some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. > > And so on. > > Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. > > So they didn't have to. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/a-lot-of-the.md) > I can have oodles of charm when I want to. p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/i-can-have.md) > Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/ideas-or-the.md) > Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/breakfast-of-champions/teachers-of-children.md)