Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.

People are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are. So let it be known. We're behaving abominably. It's like having a relative go absolutely nuts. Somebody has to say, "I think Uncle Charlie's off his rocker." We are behaving in a bizarre manner.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city can do when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.