The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

There's almost nothing like native Midwesterner anywhere else in the world, except in Asia. They're miracles all in themselves.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

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.