A Quote by Kurt Vonnegut
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
Related Quotes
I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that? The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars
Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!
Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
Pliny the Elder perished in 79 A.D. when he refused to flee from the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, insisting that everything would be all right. It wasn't.
We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.
The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.
in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.
When a man's pride is subdued it's like the sides of Mount Aetna. It was terrible during the eruption, but when that is over and the lava is turned into soil, there are vineyards and olive trees which grow up to the top.
Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so.
A bronze plaque read: GAIUS PLINIUS CAECILIUS SECUNDUS Dan made a face. "Get a load of the guy with the funny name." "I think that's Pliny the younger, the famous Roman writer," Amy supplied. She bent down to read the English portion of the tablet. "Right. In A.D. 79, Pliny chronicled the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of a major disaster." Dan yawned. "Doesn't this remind you of the clue hunt? You know–you telling me a bunch of boring stuff, and me not listening?
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
I'm 5ft 7in tall and a size six to eight on top and eight to ten on the bottom. Consequently, I get a lot of my clothes altered to fit, as I am always between sizes.
To rise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.
The thing that struck me most about the Mount St. Helens project was not the devastation of the eruption, but the logging industry - the earth transformed on that scale by humans.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit.
I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes
English
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer