Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

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.”

“My God—he writes about Earthlings all the time, and they’re all Americans. Practically nobody on Earth is an American.”

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

What the Englishman said about survival was this: “If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die.” He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: “They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go.” So it goes.