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f639f5b
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Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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66ae513
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I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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6b5c5bc
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I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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c91979c
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Nothing in this book is true.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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14ee712
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He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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1737bc5
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But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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61dedfc
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I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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026e7dd
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Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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08fa3ab
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Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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67c3796
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A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United State..
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history
humor
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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579ab7a
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And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
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corporate-influence
democracy
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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177804e
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On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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2b4e09d
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I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers,..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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8a7cd20
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Hating America] would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cr..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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c594671
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To be is to do' -- Socrates. 'To do is to be' -- Jean-Paul Sartre. 'Do be do be do' -- Frank Sinatra.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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bfe0d63
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The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.
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religion
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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52e231c
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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The same can be said about this morning's issue of The New York Times."
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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366eb98
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Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn't paid much attention to it.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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20f058c
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The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn't call it an "atomic bomb." She called it "the monster of Frankenstein."
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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cff3e64
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JOE HELLER True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel 'Catch-22' has earned in its entire history?" And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have." And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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da68cd6
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There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks. Here
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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65a3d86
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Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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fd7bb52
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It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may find it incredible, as most foreigners do right now, that a nation would want to enforce as a law something which sounds more like a dream, which reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit..
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literary-freedom
literature
writing
freedom-of-the-press
first-amendment
constitution
free-speech
writers
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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43854a2
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Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked this question: "Have you read a book from start to finish since high school?" or "Did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?" If the truthful answer is "no," then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big..
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book-banning
literature
books
united-states-of-america
first-amendment
freedom-of-speech
constitution
censorship
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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c6f7c43
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All's bad that ends badly, and it's only the sick-minded who can feed on the past.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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2dde8f8
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I didn't really steal it. I just borrowed it for all eternity
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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a250025
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You want to know why I don't have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don't fuck around. It's as simple as that. Trout
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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e47943b
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My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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1288dd3
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No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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e9ee470
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We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodely do, What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,muddily do, Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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1d43dcf
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This is not the case. I find scant evidence in my nonfiction that I have matured at all. I cannot find a single idea I hadn't swiped from somebody else and enunciated plonkingly by the time I reached the seventh grade.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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1488ef6
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The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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4dfe902
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It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them. One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater's fa..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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eff3010
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In [ , Mark Twain] proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and "the damned human race." If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind what date."
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human-race
newspapers
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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42d5a1b
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If onThe serious way Mark talked about the rule reminded Charlay what a marvelous age ten was. And Charley thought it was a pity that everybody couldn't stay ten for the rest of their lives. I everybody were ten, Charley thought, meybe rules and common decency and horse sense would have a Chinaman's chance.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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8eaae35
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Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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209bf82
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You hate America, don't you?" she said. "That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and v..
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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bbe1e8a
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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL. D.
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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afde258
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World War Two had certainly made everyone very tough.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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cd0fec6
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Life is divided up into phases," he said. "Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living."
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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62f780c
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Campbell was an ordinary-looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a blue body stocking which had yellow stripes running from his armpits to his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln's profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was red, with a blue swas..
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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2c21777
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Him! Him! Captain Eliot Rosewater-Silver Star, Bronze Star, Soldier's Medal, and Purple Heart with Cluster! Sailing champion! Ski champion! Him! Him! My God-the number of times life has said, 'Yes, yes, yes,' to him! Millions of dollars, hundreds of significant friends, the most beautiful, intelligent, talented, affectionate wife imaginable! A splendid education, an elegant mind in a big, clean body-and what was his reply when life says not..
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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85589a6
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I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.
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science
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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3455529
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All people are insane," he said. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons."
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |