Slaughterhouse-Five Quotes - Page 2 | Just Great DataBase

It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say after a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead...everything is supposed to be very quiet...and it always is, except for the birds.

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…It’s just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once that moment is gone it is gone forever.

They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun...They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, present, and future.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

All these years, I've been opening the window and making love to the world.

Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

That’s the attractive thing about war, said Rosewater. Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

Poo-tee-weet?

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

That's one thing earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, there, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls. Another one said, To describe blow-jobs artistically.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

God grant me the serentiy to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: 'Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.' It ends like this: 'Poo-tee-weet?

It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of a massacre of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.

Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.

He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.

This was a pretty girl, except she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano...

What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. When seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.

People aren't supposed to look back.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.

I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.

The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

It would sound like a dream, said Billy. Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting usually.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.

He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o'clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder.

…he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.

If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!

Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.

They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones - to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.

...those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

And so on. It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.