“I hadn't aimed at anything. If I had thought of the bullet's hitting anything, I don't remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit. The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood. Why didn't I use a blank cartridge? What kind of a symbol would that have been?”
Describing an accident in which the narrator, as a child, accidentally shot a woman
Deadeye Dick (1982)
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Kurt Vonnegut 318
American writer 1922–2007Related quotes
“I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.”
Source: The Fountainhead
Referring to marriage
A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)
On his fight with P. J. Goosen on 12 August, 2000 http://www.cmgworldwide.com/sports/duran/quotes.html
Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Ch. 8
Context: I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now — I don't suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which — thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you — is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.
Quote in Pollock's letter, Los Angeles 22 October, 1929 to Charles and Frank in New York; published in: Jackson Pollock (2011) American Letters: 1927-1947. p. 16
1925 - 1940
Associated Press interview, , quoted in [2014-11-19, Bill Cosby on Rape Allegations: ‘I Don’t Talk About It’, Maya Rhodan, Time, http://time.com/3596545/cosby-responds-rape-allegations-ap-video/, 2014-11-24]
Post-interview on-camera remarks, requesting they not air his interviewer's attempt to ask him about comedian Hannibal Buress' comedy routine about multiple women having alleged that Cosby drugged and raped them:
Brett Zongker: I have to ask about your name coming up in the news recently regarding this comedian—
Bill Cosby: No, no, we don't answer that.
Brett Zongker: OK. I just wanted to ask you if you wanted to respond about whether any of that was true.
Bill Cosby: There's no response.
Brett Zongker: I'm gonna ask you, if— With the persona that people know about Bill Cosby, should they believe anything differently about what—?
Bill Cosby: There is no comment about that.
Brett Zongker: OK.
Bill Cosby: And I'll tell you why.
Brett Zongker: OK.
Bill Cosby: I think you were told. I don't want to compromise your integrity, but um, we don't— I don't talk about it.