Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

They have been dying in my mind every day for the last fourteen years. I suspect they will do so until I’ve exhausted my own days on this earth. This is my moment trapped in amber.

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

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.

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

We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God—’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

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