Best 37 quotes of Mark Vonnegut on MyQuotes

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?'

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.

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.

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.

Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

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.

I'm not an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or the use of military force or politics. It's all I can do to know a little bit about how to help people raise their kids and what to do when they get sick. When a war happens, I just hope it gets over with quickly so that how we take care of children becomes more important again.

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.

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.

I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

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.

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

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.

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.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.

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.

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

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.

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.

Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

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.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

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.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

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.

Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.

For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff "crazy" would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it.

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms -- it's to frighten off extroverts.

I have a problem with Saint Paul, who never actually met Jesus, and with whoever it was who wrote the book of Revelation (it was definitely not Saint John). I also take issue with the idea that Jesus, after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, started working out and riding horses and having second thoughts about the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Where did this new muscular Christ come from? What are the four horsemen of the apocalypse so pissed about? What situation could possibly be made better by unleashing war, pestilence, famine, and death?

In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out. I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.

In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn't useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn't make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.

There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.