A few years ago I decided to read all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels back to back. During this process I accumulated a substantial number of quotes from my kindle highlights, and I wanted to do something with them. I decided to make a piece of digital art that overlaid his signature asterisk (sphincter) doodle on top of a selection of these quotes. The final product is below, along with a table containing most of the highlights/quotes I saved during my re-read.
Book | Quote | Themes? |
|---|---|---|
Bluebeard | The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. | Writing |
Bluebeard | She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be. | Life |
Bluebeard | What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn’t take such things too seriously. | Life |
Bluebeard | So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew. | America |
Bluebeard | 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 He 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? | America |
Bluebeard | “Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.” | Life |
Bluebeard | What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness! | Life |
Bluebeard | That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that? | War |
Bluebeard | She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy. He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time. | Life |
Bluebeard | I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud and with all my heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’” Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian. | Other |
Bluebeard | “That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.” | Writing |
Bluebeard | I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because 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. | Life |
Bluebeard | As for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici, according to Kim Bum Suk: he was a banker, which I choose to translate as “loan shark and extortionist” or “gangster,” in the parlance of the present day. | Wealth |
Bluebeard | I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control. | Life |
Bluebeard | “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: 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.” | People |
Bluebeard | Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin. | Life |
Bluebeard | “I never prayed before, but I’ll pray tonight that you never go to Europe as a soldier. We should never get suckered again into providing meat for the cannons and machine guns they love so much. They could go to war at any time. Look how big their armies are in the midst of a Great Depression! “If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again. | War |
Bluebeard | Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment. | Life |
Bluebeard | “The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.” | War |
Bluebeard | “Early one morning she crossed a meadow, carrying two precious eggs to a neighbor who had given birth to a baby the night before. She stepped on a mine. We don’t know what army was responsible. We do know the sex. Only a male would design and bury a device that ingenious. Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won.” Can I please return to my hotel?” “No,” she said. “I think I’ve reduced you to the level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to have you stay for the tea I promised you. Who knows? We might even become friends again.” | War |
Bluebeard | What is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’” | Writing |
Bluebeard | "The Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.” | War |
Bluebeard | kar•a•bek•i•an (,kar-a-‘bek-ē-an), n. (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th cent, painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both. | Maybe |
Bluebeard | Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States. | America |
Bluebeard | One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand. | Life |
Bluebeard | She replied that she wasn’t on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. “I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals,” she said. “Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.” | Life |
Bluebeard | “I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.” | Life |
Bluebeard | “Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’” | America |
Bluebeard | In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee! | Wealth |
Bluebeard | “Does the picture have a title?” she said, rejoining me at the middle. “Yes it does,” I said. “What is it?” she said. And I said: “‘Now It’s the Women’s Turn.’” | Other |
Bluebeard | Bluebeard is a fictitious character in a very old children’s tale, possibly based loosely on a murderous nobleman of long ago. In the story, he has married many times. He marries for the umpteenth time, and brings his latest child bride back to his castle. He tells her that she can go into any room but one, whose door he shows her. | Other |
Bluebeard | The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family. | Education |
Bluebeard | Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. | War |
Breakfast of Champions | GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY. | Other |
Breakfast of Champions | Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth. | People |
Breakfast of Champions | There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was. | Environment |
Breakfast of Champions | This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. | America |
Breakfast of Champions | Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way. | America |
Breakfast of Champions | They used human beings for machinery, and even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machinery. | Wealth |
Breakfast of Champions | The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy by and large. | Environment |
Breakfast of Champions | People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead. | People |
Breakfast of Champions | To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: | Other |
Breakfast of Champions | 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. | Wealth |
Breakfast of Champions | Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe. | Religion |
Breakfast of Champions | 1492: The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. | America |
Breakfast of Champions | We are all healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. | People |
Breakfast of Champions | Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. | People |
Cat's Cradle | God made mud. | Religion |
Cat's Cradle | If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. | Life |
Cat's Cradle | I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies. | Religion |