The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can...
It had to be done, Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden. I know, said Billy. That’s war. I know. I’m not complaining. It must have been hell on the ground. It was, said Billy Pi...
Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had—its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed. Flat, tufted, springy little c...
As Bokonon says: Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. The
And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, bu...
America, wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP: is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.
Why me?- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?- Yes.- Well, her...
He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America...
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a...
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.
Trout's favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BRO2B he hypothecated an America...
The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever. But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gent...
Most of the company's employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addr...
Listen - on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself...
Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read order out of chaos as order out of koze, made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him,...
All’s bad that ends badly, and it’s only the sick-minded who can feed on the past.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.