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He was in the back seat of his car, which was why he couldn’t find the steering wheel.
He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops.
They told Weary that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The scouts weren’t going to wait for them anymore.
and the great services they rendered to Christianity.
the tube which had so many of Billy’s important wires in it. Weary was going to break that tube.
She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.
They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.
Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet. So it goes. So Roland Weary was the last of the Three Musketeers.
“Spoils of war! It’s yours, all yours, you lucky lad.”
Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.
The picture was widely published two days later as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was, despite its reputation for being rich.
That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.
until the Communists realized that they could not force their way of life on weak countries.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.
There used to be a dog named Spot, but he died. So it goes. Billy had liked Spot a lot, and Spot had liked him.
They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.
that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first.
I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.
The locomotive of Billy Pilgrim’s train whistled back. They were saying, “Hello.”
to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.
Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
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.”
Billy hated the canyon. He was sure that he was going to fall in. His mother touched him, and he wet his pants.
Billy was praying to God to get him out of there before the ceiling fell in.
When Billy got his clothes back, they weren’t any cleaner, but all the little animals that had been living in them were dead. So it goes.
There were more starving Russians with faces like radium dials.
The guard shoved him back into ranks. “Vy you? Vy anybody?” he said.
In case Billy died, which he didn’t, half of the tag would mark his body and half would mark his grave.
Light leaped out through the door, escaped from prison at 186,000 miles per second.
Billy Pilgrim wondered dimly who Jerry was.
They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.
Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy.
They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war.
“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.”
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.
“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.” “You never said a truer word, dear.”
And on and on it went—that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes.
It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.
But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
Oh, boy—they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing Billy’s body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for the first time.
They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction.
There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
“How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace! As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time.”
He was being stupid.
