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"Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves."
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"Shame lies. All the time. About everything. Don't believe your shame."

"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."

"[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

"We are what we believe we are."

"Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear - than a fact that he wishes was an opinion."

"Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled."

"Some people are each envious of the person they used to be."

"No single bad person regards themselves as a bad person."

"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it."

"To say 'I want to have sex with this person' is to express a desire which is not intellectually directed in the way that 'I want to eradicate poverty in the world' is an intellectually directed desire. Furthernore, the gratification of sexual desire can only ever give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna, the great Indian scholar said: 'When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."
Explore more quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

"When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moment, past, present, future, always have existed, always will exist."

"What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain."

"The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

"Do you realize that all great literature - "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" - are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?"

"The highest possible form of treason," said Minton," is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course, it's just fun to think about.'And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people to death in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in indistrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on."
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