Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

Until you die .. it's all life.

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were.