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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3183313 | Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling donut? | inspirational | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | |
| 9b64f04 | Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments-like today at the zoo. Isn't this a nice moment?" "Yes." | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| a241587 | As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace. | war patriotism | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | |
| 39bfdc5 | 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?" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 9dc7b52 | There is no why. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 1346f87 | Listen - on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator. Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit think gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This l.. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| abd302c | Vi rendete conto che tutta la grande letteratura - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Addio alle armi, La lettera scarlatta, Il segno rosso del coraggio, l' Iliade e l' Odissea, Delitto e castigo, la Bibbia e The Charge of the Light Brigade di Tennyson - parla di che fregatura sia la vita degli esseri umani? (Non e liberatorio che qualcuno lo dica chiaro e tondo?) | literature life inspirational | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | |
| 5dd5721 | No trouble. There really isn't a heck of a lot to the job. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 2711a6e | Is Doctor Proteus on?" said Kroner's secretary. "Doctor Kroner is in." "Just a moment," said Katharine. "Doctor Proteus, Doctor Kroner is in and will speak to you." "All right, I'm on." "Doctor Proteus is on the line," said Katharine. "Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus is on the line." "Tell him to go ahead," said Kroner. "Tell Doctor Proteus to go ahead," said Kroner's secretary. "Doctor Proteus, please go ahead," said Katharine. "This is Paul.. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 083b0fb | Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth--hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone's going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following." Paul" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 9e8bf6d | A huge fireplace and Dutch oven of fieldstone filled one wall. Over them hung a long muzzle-loading rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch. On the mantel were candle molds, a coffee mill, an iron and trivet, and a rusty kettle. An iron cauldron, big enough to boil a missionary in, swung at the end of a long arm in the fireplace, and below it, like so many black offspring, were a cluster of small pots. A wooden butter churn held the door open,.. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 5166ed5 | go shoot a bear. Concentrating hard on the illusion, Paul was able to muster a feeling of positive gratitude for Anita's presence, to thank God for a woman at his side to help with the petrifying amount of work involved in merely surviving. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 546a2a3 | The television cameras dollied and panned about him like curious, friendly dinosaurs, sniffing and peering. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 73c12e6 | job left vacant two weeks ago by death--the managership of the Pittsburgh Works. "How gay can a party get?" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 22aab83 | Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read "order out of chaos" as "order out of koze," made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him, Planck, hadn't even finished high school, and Halyard had known smarter Irish setters. Yet, here the son-of-a-bitch was, elected to more than a hundred thousand bucks a year!" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| c056cf4 | And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, but touched almost nowhere. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| e66b888 | Whatever we've said, friends, we're saying still-- such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 586daaf | She quieted, and turned away under his stare. Inadvertently, he'd gained the upper hand. He had somehow communicated the thought that had bobbed up in his thoughts unexpectedly: that her strength and poise were no more than a mirror image of his own importance, an image of the power and self-satisfaction the manager of the Ilium Works could have, if he wanted it. In a fleeting second she became a helpless, bluffing little girl in his though.. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 2865cf8 | myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time." This" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 54d444e | The men wore loose loincloths that did little to conceal penes like pendulums on grandfather clocks. There | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 3856c86 | Better to be nothing than a blind doorman at the head of civilization's parade. And | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| a3e8691 | Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved? | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| e17ca31 | Only his dog had been along. Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena--apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| e7cc675 | Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| c96cfc5 | What a clever trap your Ruling Class set for us," he went on. "First the atomic bomb. Now this." "Trap?" I echoed wonderingly. They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops," he said. "Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick othe.. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 7e90700 | Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| c90aac6 | For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors--mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day. Paul | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 6bd284e | There's something about war that brings out greatness. I | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 3f9ca00 | The pride in strength and important mystery showed no less in the eyes of the sweepers than in those of the machinists and inspectors, and in those of the foreman, who alone was without a lunchbox. A | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 28ae905 | archprophet | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| c896609 | The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever. "But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full" | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 1bc338e | Me and Mike, ve vork in mine. Holy shit, ve have good time. Vunce a veek ve get our pay. Holy shit, no vork next day. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 7761f37 | the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. | truth satire | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | |
| 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. |