Kurt Vonnegut Quote
It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.Now even that had flickered out.How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.Somebody did.A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, You alright?Yes, I said.You've been standing here a long time, he said.I know, I said.You waiting for somebody? he said.No, I said.Better move on, don't you think? he said.Yes, sir, I said.And I moved on.
It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.Now even that had flickered out.How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.Somebody did.A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, You alright?Yes, I said.You've been standing here a long time, he said.I know, I said.You waiting for somebody? he said.No, I said.Better move on, don't you think? he said.Yes, sir, I said.And I moved on.
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About Kurt Vonnegut
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. It received positive reviews yet sold poorly. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several well regarded novels including two—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—that were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968.
Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Its anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amid the Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. It rose to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous. Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). He has been hailed for his dark humor commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction.