Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
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America's soldiers are being treated … like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
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I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
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I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'
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Peculiar Travel Suggestions are Dancing Lessons From God
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When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
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Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
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Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: 'See you later, Alligator.'
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Hey - guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?
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This silly playlet seemed to satisfy them completely as a picture of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who was against them, and why some people were against them. It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.
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Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
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What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.
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I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
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Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
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I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.
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Maybe God has let everybody who ever lived be reborn - so he or she can see how it ends. Even Pitecanthropus erectus and Australopithecus and Sinanthropus pekensis and the Neanderthalers are back on Earth - to see how it ends. They're all on Times Square - making change for peepshows. Or recruiting Marines.
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You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet.
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'Why are you quitting?''Sick of my job.''Because what you were doing was morally bad?' suggested the voice.'Because it wasn’t getting anybody anywhere. Because it was getting everybody nowhere.''Because it was evil?' insisted the voice.'Because it was pointless.'
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I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
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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.
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Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie withing every human being, looked outward-pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
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Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for each reaction there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.
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There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.All was forgiven.All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
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One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.