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5648722
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The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's going on."
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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436d4b4
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The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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5658852
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To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
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opening-lines
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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16e19b9
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Goodness me, the clock has struck- Alackday, and fuck my luck.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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e4ef058
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Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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6e5e6bd
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Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed ..
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slaughterhouse-five
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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1d54f24
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My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
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food
wickedness
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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c6a5177
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I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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afa77b6
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Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
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beauty
truth
breakfast-of-champions
sometimes
kurt-vonnegut
symbols
symbol
symbolism
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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103c630
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Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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b4b4b5d
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There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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701f6a1
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Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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ac22f6e
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Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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b17039b
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My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
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writing
semi-colons
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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6fef1d8
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If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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756a18a
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Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been." --
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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e56c926
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Oh, a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park, And a lion-hunter In the jungle dark, And a Chinese dentist, And a British queen-- All fit together In the same machine. Nice, nice, very nice; Nice, nice, very nice; Nice, nice, very nice-- So many different people In the same device.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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c8d8159
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Young Castle called me "Scoop." "Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?" "I might ask the same of you," I replied. "I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?" "Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out." "Or the college professors." "Or the college professors," I agreed. I shook my head. "No, I don't th..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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fc014e9
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You know -- we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God -- ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade."
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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e8904a3
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One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
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humor
satire
sarcastic-humor
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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85de880
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The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
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earth
world
truth
lousy
manufactured
planet
kurt-vonnegut
destruction
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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8fbac6c
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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.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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7fe34dc
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You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I guess that's the test." "Barely -- barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nod..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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aacba55
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She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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fda4a91
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He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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9524e12
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He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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7523da7
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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
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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d209568
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When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
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death
life
favourite-quote
excerpt
so-it-goes
novel
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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2f74559
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Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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5eb55e5
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It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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2d7f51f
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There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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bf84dc3
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Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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4988f51
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Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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12dce91
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If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C.
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politics
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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a8ea84f
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The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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2d41334
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There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,' I said, 'but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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a236c0b
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How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
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death-and-dying
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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4dde6c1
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No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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d342b8e
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Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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75e680e
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Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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f636a80
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Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
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people
life
electronic-communities
interactions
doing
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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0b1dd20
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The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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02bb933
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That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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80cfe26
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simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled..
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giftedness
mediocrity
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Kurt Vonnegut |