Slaughterhouse Five Quotes

So it goes. – Kurt Vonnegut

Billy didn’t want to hurt anyone. He didn’t want to conquer anyone. He wanted only to please, to be loved. – Kurt Vonnegut

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. – Kurt Vonnegut

Before you die on Earth, you have to live on Earth. – Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. – Kurt Vonnegut

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

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. – Kurt Vonnegut

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

He had a traumatic experience in the war, you know. He was quiet, passive, and dignified. – Kurt Vonnegut

So all we had to do in order to win was to stay sane. – Kurt Vonnegut

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. – Kurt Vonnegut

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

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. – Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. – Kurt Vonnegut

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them. – Kurt Vonnegut

Billy was fascinated by the television programs on Tralfamadore, where books were turned into light impulses and then shown on television screens a nanosecond after their authors had put finishing touches to them. – Kurt Vonnegut

And his little sister, who had died in the snows of Nagasaki when he was three years old, had stopped speaking long before then, and nobody in the family had been able to start her speaking again. – Kurt Vonnegut

By the time I got there, it was after the war. So it goes. – Kurt Vonnegut

He didn’t look back at the two zero-sen Japanese coins. They were his good-luck pieces. He would never need them again. – Kurt Vonnegut

That’s one thing I’m so glad I got to know during the war. America is beautiful. – Kurt Vonnegut

He used to make a living at public speaking. He was an expert. He bent listeners to his will. – Kurt Vonnegut

You must be very proud, sir, to have so many men under your command. – Kurt Vonnegut

The purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. – Kurt Vonnegut

There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. – Kurt Vonnegut

The planet Earth, I had reason to speculate, must be the Hell of another star. – Kurt Vonnegut

Make me young, make me young, make me young! – Kurt Vonnegut

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. – Kurt Vonnegut

Now he would be doing them because he was happy, because he was content, because he was comfortable. – Kurt Vonnegut

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. – Kurt Vonnegut

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought. – Kurt Vonnegut

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. – Kurt Vonnegut

They drove out of town with somebody from the castle sitting on the backseat. The prisoner of war made himself smart by buttoning up his coat, and the prettiest girl in the village made herself smart by unbuttoning hers. – Kurt Vonnegut

And when they were taken with gas pains, there always seemed to be a bottle of Coca-Cola there in the cupboard to relieve them. – Kurt Vonnegut

He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one. – Kurt Vonnegut

The author has written every word of it, and you, too, are responsible for what happens. – Kurt Vonnegut

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book. – Kurt Vonnegut

Let the reader be prepared for scenes of violence. – Kurt Vonnegut

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

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backward from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. – Kurt Vonnegut

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. – Kurt Vonnegut

Why me? – Kurt Vonnegut

He knew, then, that God wasn’t up in Heaven sawing away at a violin. He was down in the sewage system, trying to fix the flushing toilet. – Kurt Vonnegut

His moral philosophy was weary and defeated at a tender age, like a vendible national treasure. – Kurt Vonnegut

Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout are now each other’s PR men. – Kurt Vonnegut

Books are just so nice to have around. – Kurt Vonnegut

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

What a productive young man Billy turned out to be! – Kurt Vonnegut

It was a blue and ivory prayer rug once, but its colours had faded. So it goes. – Kurt Vonnegut

There is no beginning, no middle, no end. – Kurt Vonnegut

Now Billy points out things he can do nothing about: electric circuits too complicated for him to understand, full of dark secrets, and plumbing fixtures that ought to leak but don’t. – Kurt Vonnegut