"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."

"Or they'll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics."

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."

"There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges."

"Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth."You don't seem to agree."I don't know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."

"Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwords. Then it's time to eat stones again."

"My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite."

"I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War."

"Well finish your story anyway."Where was I?"The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.And Father started giggling," Castle continued.He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?" asked Castle.Nope."'Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

"The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman."

"I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check."

"I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career."

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

"Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference."

"Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business-you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands."

"We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again."

"Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you."

"Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns."

"Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician."

"He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,' the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. 'Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?''I missed that,' I murmured. ' I saw that,' said Sandra. 'About two days ago.''That's right,' said the bartender.'What is the secret of life?' I asked.'I forget,' said Sandra.'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found out something about protein.''Yeah,' said Sandra, 'that's it."

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

"I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore."

"Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? Only verse: Nothing."

"The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears."

"Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without."

"And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one."

"I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic."

"The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art."

"When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?"

"Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no."

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

"A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

"Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are."

"We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community."

"Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question."

"You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food."

"You'll forget it when you're dead, and so will I. When I'm dead, I'm going to forget everything"and I advise you to do the same."

"That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much."

"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."

"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."

"Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself."

"I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle."

"Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead."

"I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you cando is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestitehermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you'vebeen to college."

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself."