Slaughterhouse-Five

i just finished reading this book by kurt vonnegut. i am really enjoying works of fiction that shed light on problems with government and society. i also just finished animal farm. animal farm was about government, this one is about war. it is fiction, but i think artists (which i consider writers to be) have an ability to illuminate reality in a way that other people can't. and i appreciate this book, and animal farm, and 1984, etc., for that reason.

some quotes i really enjoyed from this book:


...there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said - and calendars.

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.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

...he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.

Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn't really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.