"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on."

"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed."

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."

"Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you."

"There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life."

"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same."

"The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts' content. And we can even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently."

"Time passed quickly. Constant did not move."

"The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean."

"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head."

"Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score."

"After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?"

"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

"We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed."

"I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."

"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her."

"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

"I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."

"If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off."

"That's the attractive thing about war, said Rosewater. "Absolutely everybody gets a little something."

"Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out."

"Maybe I did hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn't get at him because he just wasn't interested in people."

"Skyscraper National Park."

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president."

"She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, Billy said he didn't know."

"A woman's not a woman till the pills wear off."

"He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.''All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.''What's so negative about it?' I said.'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.'"Ignorance,"' I said."

"As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe."

"We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, 'People who need people are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lot's to eat."

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

"Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"And Castle nodded sagely. 'So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn't agree."

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too."

"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."

"There were lots of things to stop and see - and then it was time to go, always time to go."

"Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could."

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.'Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."

"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."

"Maturity, Bokonontells us, "is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unlesslaughter can be said to remedy anything."

"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."

"Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away...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."

"The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing."

"The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universally Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent."

"This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that."