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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | ||
| 2d2e036 | 148She once said, "Just because you have talent doesn't mean you have to you have to do something with it." | drawings kurt-vonnegut-jr | Nanette Vonnegut | |
| 5d4b7b2 | I have no idea what he sees in her. She's about as attractive as a donkey's asshole mid-shit. | Emma Hart | ||
| 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. | ||
| f2cc57c | After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: 'We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The End! | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| ee1a6b5 | think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 97b6937 | Kogda ia zagnal svoi kosmicheskii korabl' v khrono-sinklasticheskii infundibulum, menia mgnovenno ozarilo soznanie, chto vse kogda-libo byvshee prebudet vechno. a vse, chto budet, sushchestvovalo ispokon vekov. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| a26fda1 | Diadek, u vsekh durakov odna beda -- po krainei gluposti oni dazhe ne predstavliaiut sebe, chto na svete est' takaia shtuka, kak zdravyi smysl. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 7f8ebbb | Ia ZhERTVA TsEPI NESChASTNYKh SLUChAINOSTEI, KAK I VSE MY. | life | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | |
| 9ddb2fc | Skol'ko let proshlo, poka my poniali, chto smysl chelovecheskoi zhizni -- kto by chelovekom ni upravlial, -- tol'ko v tom, chtoby liubit' tekh, kto riadom s toboi, kto nuzhdaetsia v tvoei liubvi. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 91c3e4a | You know what the trouble is with New York?" she asked me. "No," I said. "Nobody here," she said, "believes that there is such a thing as innocence." | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 7ac8c36 | I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. Ask any great athlete. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | ||
| 622d28d | What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming. | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |