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Top Mark Vonnegut Quotes

Browse top 37 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Mark Vonnegut.

Favorite Mark Vonnegut Quotes

1. "At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse." ~ Mark Vonnegut
2. "Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all." ~ Mark Vonnegut
3. "Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff." ~ Mark Vonnegut
4. "It's probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well." ~ Mark Vonnegut
5. "Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in." ~ Mark Vonnegut
6. "We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is." ~ Mark Vonnegut
7. "He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950's, he was employed for Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported back to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again." ~ Mark Vonnegut
8. "Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow responsible." ~ Mark Vonnegut
9. "I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun." ~ Mark Vonnegut
10. "None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick." ~ Mark Vonnegut
11. "Are people who have been crazy held to unfair standards?Of course, but it's not in your best interest to complain. If you're paranoid and people are looking at you funny it's best to let it pass. Psychotic people have an uncanny knack for making their own worst dreams come true. Depressing things happen to depressed people way beyond what you would expect from random distribution." ~ Mark Vonnegut
12. "Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?" ~ Mark Vonnegut
13. "I often took him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato." ~ Mark Vonnegut
14. "If nothing I say sparks any thoughts or identification, it's possible you're taking too much medication. If it's the greatest talk you've ever heard, you're not taking enough." ~ Mark Vonnegut
15. "Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have." ~ Mark Vonnegut
16. "I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for." ~ Mark Vonnegut
17. "He couldn't help thinking that all that money we were spending blowing up things and killing people so far away, making people the world over hate and fear us, would have been better spent on public education and libraries. It's hard to imagine that history won't prove him right, if it hasn't already." ~ Mark Vonnegut
18. "Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is." ~ Mark Vonnegut
19. "My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest." ~ Mark Vonnegut
20. "I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it." ~ Mark Vonnegut
21. "I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real." ~ Mark Vonnegut
22. "Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible." ~ Mark Vonnegut
23. "After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it." ~ Mark Vonnegut
24. "I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time." ~ Mark Vonnegut
25. "The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal." ~ Mark Vonnegut
26. "A happy person with decent self-esteem wouldn't bother to have credentials as good as mine." ~ Mark Vonnegut
27. "Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something...." ~ Mark Vonnegut
28. "The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. 'It's not Harvard,' he said. 'Harvard's not Harvard either,' I answered." ~ Mark Vonnegut
29. "The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world." ~ Mark Vonnegut
30. "When I talk to the National Alliance onMental Illness (NAMI) and other patientsupport groups, I take questions at theend. At one talk I was asked, "What'sthe difference between yourself andsomeone without mental illness?"At another talk I was asked, "How doyou make the voices be not so mean?"I wish I knew." ~ Mark Vonnegut
31. "My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they'd ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order." ~ Mark Vonnegut
32. "Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood." ~ Mark Vonnegut
33. "It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right." ~ Mark Vonnegut
34. "The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty." ~ Mark Vonnegut
35. "Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks." ~ Mark Vonnegut
36. "What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that." ~ Mark Vonnegut
37. "Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells." ~ Mark Vonnegut

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Mark Vonnegut Quotes
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Today's Quote

Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature."
Author: Anton Chekhov

What Did Mark Vonnegut Talk About?

Thin
Wit
Here
Hen
Per
Ten
Ear
Hey
Thou
King
Self
End
Lit
Use
Son
Cause
Bee
Tie
Ally
Tan
Patient
Old
Mental
Though
Away
Another
Pen
Mean
Rate
Talk
Ours
Race
Crazy
Enough
Making
Care
Low
Boo
Read
Book
Hear
Almost
Side
Having
Doctor
Star
Writing
Possible
Pretty
Era

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