Notable Excerpts
And I’m reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, “What’s your name?” And I say, My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin …” And so on to infinity.
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.
The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a woman on the outside—and lined with spikes. The front of the woman was composed of two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
The word photography was first used in 1839, and it was in that year, too, that Louis J. M. Daguerre revealed to the French Academy that an image formed on a silvered metal plate covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in the presence of mercury vapor.
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
…and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.
He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.
He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.
Practically nobody on Earth is an American.
“That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue…Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money.
Their address was this: “Schlachthof-fünf.”
One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.
He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway,
Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.
There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see.