Slaughterhouse-Five Quotes - Page 3 | Just Great DataBase

Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.'Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.

There in the hospital Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in times of war: he was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he is interesting to hear and see.

When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past...all moments past, present and future always have existed always will exist.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.

Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again.

Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.

I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Really - I'm OK." And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.

I love her for that, because it was so human.

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and 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. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.

As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said—and calendars.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines. We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.

I'm afraid I don't read as much as I ought to," said Maggie."We're all afraid of something," Trout replied. "I'm afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers.

The Americans’ clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.

Look at him! That's life, according to the medical profession. Isn't life wonderful?

He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy's mother 'dear' He was experimenting with calling everybody dear.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.

The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him--news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.

There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go.

There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said—and calendars.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

She celebrated frustration by clapping her hands.

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

It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: 'How did I get so old?

They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Have a good nap, did you? said the porter. Yes, said Billy. Man, said the porter, you sure had a hard-on.

The very toughest reporters were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war.