Quotes

1. Shortly before he died, my father asked me, "You know- you never write any stories with villains in them". I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after war.
2. pp. 12 on how the book became "A Children's Crusade"
3. It is so short and jumbled becauses there is nothing intelligent to be said about a massacre.
4. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty.
5. It looked like Dresden after it was firebombed- like the surface of the moon.
6. He was in favor of increased bombings in Vietnam. He wanted to bomb Vietnam back to stone age if it failed to see reason.
7. Among the things Billy Pilgrims could not change were the past, the present and the future.
8. pp. 60 on watching a war movie in reverse
9. On the eigth-day, the forty-year-old hobo told Billy "This isn't that bad. I can be comfortable anywhere"... On the ninth day, the hobo died.
10. When he coughed, he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with Sir Issac Newton's third law. Billy thought this can be useful in rocketry.
11. The visitor from Outer Space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn (if he could), why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.
12. [Refering to his mother] She made him feel embarassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and keep him living. and Billy did not really like that life at all.
13. Dresden was one big flame. The flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.
14. [Referring to a funeral of a great French Chef] All the great chefs in the world are there. It's a beautiful ceremony. Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.
15. Trout lose the argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys and the boy replied: 'Yeah - but I bet they quit after a week, it's such a royal screwing.'
16. Trout incidentally had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves.... It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.