Quotes By Letter: V

“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.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

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“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

-A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut

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“The biggest truth to face now—what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life—is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

-A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut

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“...the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.”

-Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut

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“...teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492.

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. ”

-Breakfast Of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

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“Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not 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 interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was discover what other people were thinking and then they thought that, too.”

-Breakfast Of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

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“I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.”

-Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

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“I congratulated him on what he'd said on his way to be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white folks. I quote: 'This is a beautiful country.' In only five words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a civilized nation until the Holocaust.”

-God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut

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“Sometimes [he] would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to [the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at] Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it's time to eat stones again.'”

-Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut

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“--teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.
That may be so. 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. So many people wanted to believe me!
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

-Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

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“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, 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 in its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. It's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

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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.”

-Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

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“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

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“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

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“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

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“I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, what desirable results they had been and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still. I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God--from whom?'”

-Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

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“Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and 'Blessed are the meek,' and 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.'

Henry David Thoreau said most famously, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'

So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough. ”

-Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

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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.”

-Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

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