Slaughterhouse-Five

“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 Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And I will never know what her life is. If there is a pattern there it will not shape itself to anything these eyes can recognize. Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing. Do yo

Both Satoru and I fell silent. On the radio, a reporter was expounding on a theory about a random serial killing spree in another prefecture. “What kind of person . . . ?” Satoru said. “What is the world coming to?” I answered. Satoru listened carefully to the rest of the report and then said, “People have been wondering the same thing for over a t