Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

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

•  "The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks." 

• "The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time."

• "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. [...] It is just an illusion we have 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."

• "His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light and a hum. And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds."

• "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom always to tell the difference."

•  "And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other."

• "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."

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

• "I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976."

• "Nothing happened that night. It was the night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes."

• "If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed."

• "Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'"