Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death

Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel presents the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War Two and its effects on Billy Pilgrim, the possibly-insane time-travelling protagonist. Slaughterhouse-Five takes a more serious tone than Vonnegut's other novels, dealing with the ethics of warfare as well as alternative concepts of time and their implications regarding fate and mortality.

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone."

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

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

"'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."

"The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal."

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

"They had teeth like piano keys."

"There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes."

"'All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.'"

"So they were there trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

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

"'That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.'"

"It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love."

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."

"'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and making love to the world.'"

"She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control."

"'I put everything that happens to me in books.'"

"Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all."

"'Oh God--' he said, 'I knew it was going to be bad getting old.' He shook his head. 'I didn't know it was going to be this bad.'"