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A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
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.
Ten
Marks
Vesuvius
Eight
Arrangements
Numerals
Mark
Symbols
Waterloo
Battle
Cast
Eruption
Eyes
Casts
Envision
Eye
Twenty
Punctuation
Book
Twenties
Arrangement
People
Six
Mount
Phonetic
More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!
Kurt Vonnegut
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
Kurt Vonnegut
Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.
Kurt Vonnegut
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Kurt Vonnegut
I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.
Kurt Vonnegut
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Kurt Vonnegut
We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
Well here you are, there it is, THIS is what it's all about.
Kurt Vonnegut
Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Kurt Vonnegut
The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.
Kurt Vonnegut
He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Kurt Vonnegut
Life is no way to treat an animal.
Kurt Vonnegut
This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegut
Don't be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.
Kurt Vonnegut
There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.
Kurt Vonnegut
What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?
Kurt Vonnegut
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
. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
Kurt Vonnegut
there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
Kurt Vonnegut
