There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
All this happened, more or less.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?
If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
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.
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.
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next
Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
or simply:
