Word: inventer
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...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...
...soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future. Dad-da, Florence, the great Durante; her babyishness and desire, his mad, heroic restraint-Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I'd overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! But if I did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would me elders hold up against that? And if they couldn...
...declared that a literal account of anything is neither true nor false," wrote his biographer, Hesketh Pearson. "And so, in order to achieve essential truth, he would embroider an episode and sometimes even invent one, as in his account of dancing around [Dublin's] Fitzroy Square with a policeman in the early hours of the morning...
Brock persisted. He assembled skeptical experts in February, hung on his wall the Detroit News cartoon showing him as a heavenly messenger hovering with tire and spark plug and saying, "Don't just stand there! Invent something!" And the realities of oil began to change minds. Hundreds of engineers and scientists gathered and debated the prospects. They made out a report that went to the White House, concluding that major breakthroughs in engines, fuels and structures were possible...
...tarnished setting of cultivated hypocrisy, in contrast to the let-it-all-hang-out confessions of the '70s. Yet, appearances, manners, and feelings are also truths; they can support good, bad, noble, or banal intentions. "A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent," wrote Willian Blake. The issues then, as now, had to do with intention as much as truth, purpose as much as technique, loyalty as much as self-realization...