{
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/timequake/extenuating-circumstance-to-be-mentioned",
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  "id": "445b609e-c216-4ae0-adbe-8b6b972f18e9",
  "slug": "extenuating-circumstance-to-be-mentioned",
  "text": "Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Kurt Vonnegut",
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  "book": {
    "title": "Timequake",
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      "name": "humor",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:42:44",
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      "id": "f5adfa83-c06f-4d4d-ad13-6871cd36ca89",
      "slug": "many-people-need",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/timequake/many-people-need",
      "text": "Many people need desperately to receive this message: \"I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.\"",
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      "topics": [
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          "name": "loneliness",
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      "id": "e272997e-4379-4ce8-bef1-89c5bed7cf07",
      "slug": "adam-and-eve",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/timequake/adam-and-eve",
      "text": "Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.",
      "language": "en",
      "character": null,
      "chapter": null,
      "chapter_parent": null,
      "page": 238,
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      "topics": [
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      "id": "df032f97-be34-405f-a94d-e1ae6fa62074",
      "slug": "if-you-really-want",
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      "text": "If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, \"art or not,\" you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. [...] The situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. [...] There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. [...] If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not their pictureness. [...]\n\nThere is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.",
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