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How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

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.
Unpredictable
Machinery
Complicated
Really
Life
Cradle

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High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
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I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?
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The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.
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You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
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If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.
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The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks.
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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.
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It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
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People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
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The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.
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Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
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In the middle of Siberia I guess there's a lake that big [ like the Great Lakes], but there are practically no other lakes that big with fresh water.
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Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
Kurt Vonnegut
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She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Kurt Vonnegut
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If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
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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’?
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Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
Kurt Vonnegut
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What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
Kurt Vonnegut