And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.


"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"
"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?"
"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"
**
"And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."


I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know - you never wrote a story with a villain in it.' I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.


All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist...It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.


"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."


"There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."


"People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers."


One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.


 - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five