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It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems ... This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry-or laugh.

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.
Makes
Strikes
Problem
Solve
Always
Expectations
Men
Cry
Gruesome
Laugh
Comical
Laughing
Untrue
Problems
Expectation
Culture
Memorable

More quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

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The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.
Kurt Vonnegut
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Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.
Kurt Vonnegut
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I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.
Kurt Vonnegut
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This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegut
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We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.
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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You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.
Kurt Vonnegut
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You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.
Kurt Vonnegut
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The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.
Kurt Vonnegut
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In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.
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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Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. Live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy. Get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument.
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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One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.
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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The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.
Kurt Vonnegut