Quotes From "Bluebeard" By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

1
That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain". Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
2
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.
3
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.
4
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
5
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.
6
Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't, " I said." So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
7
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.
8
The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone, " he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic." The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone, " says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be." The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting, " says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. . Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
9
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.
10
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.
11
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.