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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
13e8b26	If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another"			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
4ebaf31	be true to yourself, and you can't be false to anybody else, and			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
e675010	Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control."			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
71dc327	They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful, quiet. They had rifles. Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other. Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was preposterous - six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no we..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
d7c1df1	Rented a tent, a tent, a tent; Rented a tent, a tent, a tent. Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a, rented a tent.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
b269f7f	I wonder about turtles.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
cc3a920	Billy now leaned over that parapat, looked down at all the people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors. They were a lot of fun.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
ab378f6	The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution. I			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
407333f	The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers then. Uncle Alex must have thought something like this: "God help us. Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain. Well--at least there is a Harvard man with whom he can discuss this ridiculous dream." (I..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
c0ee77d	He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. He says. Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to act in next.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
1cec3cd	Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
9246337	The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all t..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
fd7931e	I thought that was pretty good. So then I disturbed my father at his typewriter, and asked him what my heritage was from his side of the family. I didn't know then what sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one."			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
56cd4a6	But," he said, "but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn't even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding..." He shuddered, "Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's th..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
26870d1	It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden. "I know," said Billy. "That's war." "I know. I'm not complaining." "It must have been hell on the ground." "It was," said Billy Pilgrim. "Pity the men who had to do it." "I do." "You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground." "It was all right," said Billy. "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does."			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
298e86d	Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell--keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two second..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
b1ccdaf	I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell. The			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
350425c	No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote. The			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
e20dfe7	the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
8ed16ce	Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BRO2B he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D's. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too. All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the gov..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
cf877dd	On an average day, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.' So it goes. 'In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons.' So it goes. 'This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the y..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
80c2d4e	I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
37a365f	Real people don't make their livings that way any more. Those three romantics out there make as much sense as Marie Antoinette and her milkmaids. When the bankruptcy proceedings begin - in a week, a month, a year - they'll find out that their only economic value was as animated wallpaper for my restaurant here.' Bunny, to his credit, was not happy about this. 'That's all over, men working with their hands and backs. They are not needed.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
d0bc7ff	He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire ..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
7a71ab0	You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes--" said the G-man, "and yet, here your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro." "What's so mysterious about that?" said Jones. "Don't you hate them?" said the G-man. "Certainly not," said Jones. "We all believe the same basic thing." "What's that?" said the G-man. "This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people," said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley ..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
6929140	People who can read and write expertly, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect we might be civilized after all.		reading writing miracles	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
1cf6356	Poi si volto verso di me, per farmi vedere com'era arrabbiata, e che quella rabbia era per me. Stava parlando tra se, quindi quello che disse ad alta voce fu solo il frammento di una conversazione piu lunga. "Eravate solo dei bambini, allora!" disse. "Cosa?" dissi io. "Eravate solo dei bambini, durante la guerra... come quelli che stanno giocando di sopra!" Annuii; era vero. All'epoca della guerra eravamo degli stupidi sbarbatelli, appen..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
131977c	I then believed that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from which his riches came. That was very juvenile of me. Great wealth should be accepted unquestioningly, or not at all.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
a201e8f	Truly great poems never do, somehow.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
31dfb5d	Also, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. "Howl" does not deal with such adventures. Truly great poems never do, somehow."			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
649623f	It might make me seem more human at this point, which is to say more sympathetic, if I were to declare that I itched and blinked and nearly swooned with a feeling of unreality. Sorry. Not so. I confess to a ghastly lack in myself. Anything I see or hear or feel or taste or smell is real to me. I am so much a credulous plaything of my senses that nothing is unreal to me. This armor-plated credulity has been continent even in times when I was..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
0aaf402	Most of the company's employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addressed on the loading docks. I am reminded now of dead American soldiers, teenagers mostly, all packaged and labeled and addressed on loading docks in Vietnam. How many people knew or cared how these curious artifacts were actually manufactured?..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
10cb72f	Lucky me , Lucky mud			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
6dee6c7	There is a fine article in the current Reader's Digest with the title, "There are No Atheists in Foxholes."			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
9e12bbe	War is now a form of TV entertainment		war	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
c8f60b8	Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.		war-profiteering war	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
6417403	We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
f02fe9f	Other people say, "Hello" or "Goodbye!" We always say, "Excuse me," no matter what we're doing.' He threw up his hands. 'No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people shouldn't have to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, "Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?"			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
41af884	That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain"."		pain personality	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
f2448fb	It was a perfectly good word - until Eliot got hold of it. It's spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word.' He looked up at an oil painting of his deceased wife. 'For instance - I loved her more than I lo..			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
32c14c6	Years and years. Why did it have to happen? It was one more hollow echo to the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask			Kurt Vonnegut Jr
af127f7	I have never identified with the "K" in Kafka's works, by the way. Having grown up in a democracy, I have dared to imagine that I know at all times who is really in charge, what is really going on. This could be a mistake."		leadership kafka knowledge	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
dd6eb42	One German-American friend of mine, an architectural historian my own age, can be counted on to excoriate Woodrow Wilson after he has had several strong drinks. He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and stu..		stupidity woodrow-wilson nationality patriotism ignorance knowledge	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
0d26b57	Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.			Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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