Mark Vonnegut Quotes
-
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.
→ -
My only hope was to be polite.
→ -
I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.
→ -
None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.
→ -
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.
→ -
There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.
→ -
We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.
→ -
Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.
→ -
And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'
→ -
Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.
→ -
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.
→ -
Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.
→ -
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.
→ -
Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
→ -
Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.
→ -
It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
→ -
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.
→ -
As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.
→ -
I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.
→ -
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.
→ -
Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?
→ -
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.
→ -
The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service
→
Related Authors
-
Rip Torn Actor -
Mark Twain Author -
John Steinbeck Author -
Joseph Heller Novelist -
Jack Kerouac Novelist -
Charles J. Shields Novelist -
Margaret Atwood Poet -
George Orwell Novelist -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Elyn Saks Professor -
Chuck Palahniuk Novelist -
Charles Bukowski Poet -
Kay Redfield Jamison Psychologist -
Susan Orlean Journalist -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
Steven Erikson Novelist -
Dan Wakefield Novelist -
J. D. Salinger Writer -
Ray Bradbury Writer