Slaughterhouse-Five Quotes

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

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.

There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

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.

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.

This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

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.

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

Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money.

Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold.

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

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

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

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

Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

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.

The nicest veterans...the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

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