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Bluebeard QUOTES

Bluebeard QUOTES

1 " We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

2 " I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

3 " These things happen. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

4 " The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines? "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

5 " Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

6 " He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

7 " So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

8 " I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian] "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

9 " All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

10 " It's the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: 'Good-bye. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

11 " What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate? "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

12 " Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that? "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

13 " Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

14 " What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness! "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

15 " I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

16 " Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

17 " The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

18 " ...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night! "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

19 " Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard

20 " Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Bluebeard