Vonneguts Quotes & Sayings

To be an achiever doesn't mean to achieve only big things. Every small achievement counts big time. Never despise small beginnings. — Euginia Herlihy

To Death I yield, but not to Doubt, who slays before! — Edith M. Thomas

What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young? — Saint John Chrysostom

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. — George Orwell

I was voted valedictorian, and at my school it wasn't based on grades; that was the popular vote. — Thomas Middleditch

I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners. — David B. Lentz

Truth may sometimes hurt, but delusion harms. — Vanna Bonta

As much as of course that Englishness of always to be embarrassed about any sense of complement, it is nice to know that a lot of the projects that I've worked on that people do feel there has been some effect. — Robin Ince

The lack of fiscal responsibility is one of the main reasons I finally left my old Party. — Lincoln Chafee

I don't say it and I don't think it. It's their affair and let them eat it with their bread; whether or not they were lovers, they've already made their accounting with God. I tend to my vines, it's their business, not mine; I don't stick my nose in; if you buy and lie, your purse wants to know why. Besides, naked I was born, and naked I'll die: I don't lose or gain a thing; whatever they were, it's all the same to me. And many folks think there's bacon when there's not even a hook to hang it on. But who can put doors on a field? Let them say what they please, I don't care. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power. — Elbert Hubbard

As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. ("I write with a big black crayon," he would write to me later, "while you're more of an impressionist. I don't think you have it in you to be crude.") In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier. — Gail Godwin

A memory rises: Etienne was in a field east of the city with his brother. It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for the boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free. — Anthony Doerr