Slaughterhouse 5

Slaughterhouse 5

Images/Referencing

P5

I used my daughter’s crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all the middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side.

P16

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’

P17

Words for the Wind, Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

P17

(scene) Death on the Installment Plan,

Erika Ostrovsky’s Celine and His Vision

He screams on paper, Make them stop . . . don’t let them move anymore at all . . . There, make them freeze . . . once and for all! . . . So that they won’t disappear anymore!

P18

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

So it goes.

P22

‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamdore 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.

P22

Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”

P25

Billy was playing ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ with music by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Marin Luther.

P27

The involuntary dancing, up and down, up and down, made his hip joints sore.

P27

He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

P27

‘Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.’ – Roland Weary

p29

the famous ‘Iron Maiden of Nurmeburg.’

P32

And the crucifix went up on the wall of Billy Pilgrim.

P32

The Americans had no choice but to leave trails in the snow as unambiguous as diagrams in a book on ballroom dancing step, slide, rest step, slide, rest

P32

Weary looked like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, all bundled up for battle.

P34

They shook hands all around. They all called themselves ‘The Three Musketeers.’

P35

Somewhere a dog was barking.

P35

He smelled the chlorine from the swimming pool next door, head the springboard boom.

P43

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.

P44

‘If you look in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve.’

P46

There was a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace.

P48

There was a photographer present, a German was correspondent with a Leica.

P48

Billy was on his way to a Lions Club luncheon meeting.

P49

There was a tap on Billy’s car window.

P50

A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:

GOD GRANT ME

THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE.

COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISON ALWAYS

TO TELL THE

DIFFERENCE.

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

P58

Billy looked out through the ventilator. The railroad yard was a desert now, except for a hospital train marked with red crosses on a siding far, far way. Its locomotive whistled. The locomotive of Billy Pilgrim’s train whistled back. They were saying, ‘Hello.’

P58

Somewhere in there was Christmas.

P58

to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.

P59

Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughter’s wedding night. He was forty-four. The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy’s backyard. The stripes were orange and black.

P59

The moonlight cam into the hallway through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy’s two children, children no more.

P62

Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl.

P62

‘Welcome aboard, Mr Pilgrim,’ said the loudspeaker, ‘Any questions?’

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: ‘Why me?’

‘That is a very Earthling questions 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.’ Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

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

P66

At the base of the pole from which the light bulb hung were three seeming haystacks.

P67

The coats were cemented together with ice, so the guards used bayonets as ice picks,

P67

That dog had a voice like a big bronze gong,

P68

He also coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body

P69

The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled wall.

P72

He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood with his mother and father on Bright Angle Point, at the rim of Grand Canyon.

P72

Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

‘Exactly,’ said the voice.

‘They are telegrams?’

‘There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right; each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene……’

p76

Out marched fifty middle-aged Englishmen. They were singing ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ from The Pirates of Penzance.

P79

It was in this setting that the evening’s entertainment would take place, a musical version of Cinderella, the most popular story ever told.

P81

Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden.

P85

‘That’s a beautiful lake.’

P87

“My God, my God ” I said to myself, “It’s the Children’s Crusade.”

P89

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.

So it goes.

P90

The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

P90

Now she was eating a Milky Way.

P91

Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the Earth was 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away.

P93

He showered after his exercise and trimmed his toenails. He saved, and sprayed deodorant under his arms, while a zoo guide on a raised platform outside explained what Billy was doing and why.

P97

While Billy was making love to her, she imagined that she was a famous woman in history. She was being Queen Elizabeth the First of England, and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus.

P98

A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past on the marriage bed.

P100

EVERYTHING

WAS

BEAUTIFUL,

AND

NOTHING

HURT

P102

The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing.

P103

Here is what the message said:

PLEASE LEAVE

THIS LATRINE AS

TIDY AS YOU

FOUND IT!

P104

The Blue Fairy Godmother was embarrassed, and angry, too.

‘If I’d known I was fighting a chicken,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have fought so hard.’

‘Um.’

P105-106

Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s monograph

p113

They were followed by an Englishman dragging his mattress and carrying a dartboard.

p117

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a geodesic dome.

p119

'Close the fucking door,' somebody said to Billy. 'Were you born in a barn?'

p119

Cinderella's slippers,

p120

The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the following vows to himself: To brush his tech twice a day, to shave once a day, to wash his face and hands before every meal and after going to the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise for at least half an house each morning and the move his bowels, and to look into a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly with respect to posture.

p121

'Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,' murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. 'Go take a flying fuck at the moon.'

p126

Their address was this: 'Schlachthof-funf.' Schlachthof meant slaughterhouse. Funf was good old five.

p148

The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. They saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.] The ideas was to hasten the end of the war.

p150

The Cadillac was a body-and-fender man's wet dream.

p151

Her I.Q. was 103

p155

'How many dots do you see?' Billy Pilgrim asked him.

p155

The old man was in agony because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he belched.

p158

Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say.

p159

He sat in the back of the jiggling coffin.

p160

,and a mantel clock that ran on changes of barometric pressure.

p162

Christ of the carol:

The cattle are lowing,

The Baby awakes.

But the little Lord Jesus

No crying he makes.

p166

The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil future. So they gave praying a whirl.

It worked. Olive oil went up.

p170

'To describe blow-jobs artistically.'

p173

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

p175

The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.

p176

But then the bodies rotted and liquified, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.

So it goes.

p177

Birds were talking.

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'