Browsing Quotes, page 119
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I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: Cat's CradlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:11 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: Cat's CradlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:09 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I think you’ll find,” said Dr. Breed, “that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.”
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: Cat's CradlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:09 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: Cat's CradlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:08 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Live by the 'foma’ [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutSource: Cat's CradlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:07 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords – chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But Old Derby was a character now.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Where am I?” said Billy Pilgrim.
“Trapped in another blob of amber, Mr. Pilgrim. We are where we have to be just now – three hundred million miles from Earth, bound for a time warp which will get us to Tralfamadore in hours rather than centuries.”
“How – how did I get here?”
“It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:
God grant me
The serenity to accept
The things I cannot change,
Courage
To change the things I can,
And wisdom always
To tell the
Difference.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:01 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.’
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:54 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:53 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, “You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.”
I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:50 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, 'Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:49 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is hardly believable how much can be achieved by this sort of speech, aimed at curing people, wholly directed to the good of the people listening. When the character is impressionable it is easily won over to a passion for what is noble and honourable; while a person’s character is still malleable, and only corrupted to a mild degree, truth strikes deep if she finds the right kind of advocate.
Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A person who goes to a philosopher should carry away with him something or other of value every day; he should return home a sounder man or at least more capable of becoming one. And he will: for the power of philosophy is such that she helps not only those who devote themselves to her but also those who come into contact with her.
Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:47 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work.
Why ‘liberal studies’ are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!
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