Kurt Vonnegut

You couldn't help that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Dear Reader: The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat's Cradle. A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I've written, a few of the speeches I made.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

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

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.

He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Hey — guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?

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?"