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If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.

Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut
Age: 84 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 11
Died: 2007
Died: April 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Indianapolis
Indiana
Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.
Really
Hanging
Like
Vietnam
People
Paradise
Vanity
Dies
Talking
Casualties
Felt
Foolishness
Might
Teenage

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Kurt Vonnegut
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If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I've been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.
Kurt Vonnegut
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A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
Kurt Vonnegut
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the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.
Kurt Vonnegut
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There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I love you, Eliza,” I said. She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.” “Why not?” I said. “It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?
Kurt Vonnegut
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Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.
Kurt Vonnegut
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All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
Kurt Vonnegut