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High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.
Kurt Vonnegut
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In a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country, six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
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Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I've ever had, the only love I ever will have
Kurt Vonnegut
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The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls. Another one said, To describe blow-jobs artistically.
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It was Trout's fantasy that somebody would be outraged by the footprints. This would give him the opportunity to reply grandly, "What is it that offends you so? I am simply using man's first printing press. You are reading a bold and universal headline which says,'I am here, I am here, I am here.'"
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I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions.
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Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.
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If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.
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No matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones.
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And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they'd been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots—roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loan, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep—in home.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Old Norwegian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.
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It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?
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Trout trudged onward, a stranger in a strange land. His pilgrimage was rewarded with new wisdom, which would never have been his had he remained in his basement in Cohoes. He learned the answer to a question many human beings were asking themselves so frantically: "What's blocking the traffic on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?"
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Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next — and on and on.
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She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.
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Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Many people found our house spooky, and the attic in fact as full of evil when I was born. It housed a collection of more than three hundred antique and modern firearms. Father had bought them during his and Mother's six-month honeymoon in Europe in 1922. Father thought them beautiful, but they might as well have been copperheads and rattlesnakes. They were murder.
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Quoth the doorbell with its silence, no comment at this time.
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I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.
Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Quote of the day
Nothing is there more friendly to a man than a friend in need.
Plautus
Kurt Vonnegut
Creative Commons
Born:
November 11, 1922
Died:
April 11, 2007
(aged 84)
Bio:
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was an American author. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction.
Known for:
Slaughterhouse 5 (1969)
Cat's Cradle (1963)
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Mother Night (1961)
The Sirens of Titan (1959)
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