Slaughterhouse-Five Quotes

So it goes.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

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

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

It is all right to be a rabbit again.

Billy made a rumbling noise inside the coffin, and then he laughed.

The Fourteenth Air Force stationed at Kunming in China was hidden in the barren hills.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

We had seen burned children before.

It’s not the war was over for Billy Pilgrim. It was merely being interrupted.

The ceremony to dedicate a new building at the Ilium School of Optometry had begun exactly as planned.

Billy appeared to be trying to construct an explanation, perhaps even a defense, of the crime of Dresden.

It was high time for him to gather up the remnants of his dignity, to put back into place some of the personality, painstakingly put together over the years, cell by cell.

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.

She was a billygoat, and so was her mother.

The little dog had a broken leg. Billy carried it to the kitchen and made a bag of mashed potatoes.

The frosting was her specialty. She made it with vinegar and whipped egg whites and a little bit of sugar.

Only a crazy chicken would squeal in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

The aftershock of cutting up those rabbits was still with him.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

The lake melted helplessly, and there wasn’t any of it left.

A Tralfamadorian is sees all time’s periods as being equally real.

I think that women want a whole lot of what they want. But which things, precisely?

Time is simply the way we make our way through it all.

Dresden will be gone forever, except in the memories of the survivors and the elderly, and the ruins will be as covered with lovely green bush and flowers, as sleekly geas summer lawn.

Billy and the little horse wandered around the ruins until they met an old man who was looking for his son.

The old man had reminded him of Edgar Derby.

You taught me that, my dear. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

He’d believed Billy’s camouflage story. That was the only story that made any sense. Everybody believed it.

The ward for male mental patients in a veterans’ hospital is the biggest thing going in the tribe of Haydons.

Billy went on doodling. He had worked his way across the irregular top of Times Square. It looked like a giant blanket of fog.

This wasn’t a movie about war. It was war.

The hobo said that he’d being licking slowly around that bowl of mush for as long as he could remember.

It happened that Billy was lying on his back. He turned his head.

She was as flat as a pearl brooch in a church.”

Montana Wildhack was weeping, too, over another pop shot. The wine list of the use was just ruined!

The one thing I hadn’t predicted, though, was that I’d be like this during the war.

Sanity was statistical.

It was all right to hide in love for a while, and then come out again when it suited him.

When the two American privates got into the machine and Betty waved goodbye to them, the noise of the propeller was deafening.

That was the last in time Billy ever saw of her.

And then Billy made the mistake of thinking aloud.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.

So it goes.