"If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off."
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Quote collection
Kurt Vonnegut quotes (page 7 of 49)
978 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."
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"A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society."
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"Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die."
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"Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
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"Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."
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"Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes."
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"...Skyscraper National Park"
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"Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
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"Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action."
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"Roses are red, And ready for plucking, You're sixteen, And ready for high school."
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"No art is possible without a dance with death."
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"The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically."
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"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
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"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
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"We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap."
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"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."
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"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."
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"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"
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"And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"
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