# Quote — Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

> And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

- Author: [Kurt Vonnegut](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut.md)
- Book: [Palm Sunday](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/palm-sunday.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut#Palm_Sunday_(1981)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/palm-sunday/and-i-believe

## More from this book

> Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/palm-sunday/jokes-can-be-noble.md)

> [Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife] is for me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams.
>
> And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie — anywhere. The plea is this: "Please, pretty lady, don't make me play with my private parts again."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/palm-sunday/gay-taleses-thy.md)

> I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/palm-sunday/i-think-it-can.md)