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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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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
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World
Black
Roll
People
Given
Piano
Music
Jazz
Mean
Rock
Really
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Never
Gave
Would
American
Pianist
Like
Perfect
Twice

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The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on? she asked me. The big show is inside my head, I said.
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What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
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We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.
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If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.
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The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.
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It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace.
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Jack Benny, Fred Allen. Their jokes were wonderful. It takes skill to be funny. The timing of Jack Benny was so fine. It is a form of genius for which we should be grateful.
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Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
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The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.
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profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.
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Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
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Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
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Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
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Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
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How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
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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.
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Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.
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... life, by definition, is never still.
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I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.
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Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
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