She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

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.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big

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

And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.