Logan > Logan's Quotes

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Why so many of us knocked us major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were tring to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“I’m just brutally fuckin’ honest about goin’ ahead and doin’ what I have to do. But it’s not that I can’t sense people’s feelings. People are hurt.

Whenever you move forward, you leave a fuckin’ wake.

—Yeah, and your wake’s a BIG one.
It’s a big wake. A lotta destruction behind me.

—Are you very good at saying goodbye to people?

No. I don’t like long goodbyes.

—HA HA HA. Sometimes you don’t like ANY goodbye at all!

Well … some goodbyes are more subtle than others. Sometimes only one of the people involved knows that it’s a goodbye. But that’s because—

—YEAH?????

I guess it’s because I’m chickenshit and I don’t want to hurt people. And that’s a weakness of mine. I could be more honest about certain things. See, these people that say I’m so honest—I’m not that honest.”
― Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

“A bad goal makes you say, “I want to do that some day.” A great goal makes you take action immediately.”
― Derek Sivers, Hell Yeah or No: What's Worth Doing

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.

Quoth Mandarax:

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“I went and bought a half ounce of cocaine and, in one week, assembled the entire Live Rust album and movie soundtrack. In a week. Y’know, it’s not the drugs, it’s the attitude that goes with ’em. - David Briggs”
― Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“May I ask you a highly personal question?"

"It's what life does all the time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
― Albert Camus

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall