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"Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then it's time to eat stones again."
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"Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose."
"Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred."
"I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said."
"Sociologically speaking, as Americans we often lack social, cultural, and mindful awareness. We hear the stories of how our arrogance has been known to offend, confuse, and alienate people from other cultures. Arrogance is the thief of mindfulness and it happens from both directions."
"The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."
"The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance."
"A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful."
Explore more quotes by Kurt Vonnegut
"There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life."
"The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean."
"And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree."
"There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go."
"The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing."
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