I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they're still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.

I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.