Slaughter House 5 Quotes

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

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

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.

If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

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.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

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

If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

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

How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

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

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life… it’s The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that’s not enough anymore.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still–if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

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

Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

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. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

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

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed 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.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

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

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

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

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.