"One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 33 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy."
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"I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd."
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"As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe."
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"The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it"
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"And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor."
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"Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth."
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"Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much."
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"We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are."
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"Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones."
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"Because of the movies nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war."
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"Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful."
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"His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased."
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"Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."
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"Hardly anyone in the world is an American"
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"Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action."
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"That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues."
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"Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president."
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"Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time."
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"So many people think that practicing an art is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend."
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