Slaughterhouse-Five Quotes

Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from Slaughterhouse-Five.

Fate and Free Will Quotes

So it goes. (1.1.3, 1.21.2, 1.21.5, 2.2.1, 2.4.2, 2.7.3, 2.12.4, 2.16.2, 2.17.5, 2.19.16, 2.23.4, 2.27.2, 3.16.2, 3.22.1, 3.23.2, 4.3.1, 4.11.3-4, 4.14.2, 4.16.1, 4.16.4, 4.19.1, 5.5.2, 5.7.2, 5.8...

Warfare Quotes

Do you know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? [...] I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?" (1.2.9-11)

Time Quotes

Time obsessed [Céline]. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the Installment Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them...

Suffering Quotes

Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn't have anything to do with his coming unstuck. They were simply able to give hi...

Morality and Ethics Quotes

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Tho...

Foolishness and Folly Quotes

Billy was preposterous—six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon, and no boots. On his feet were cheap, lo...

Freedom and Confinement Quotes

[Roland Weary] had been saving Billy's life for days, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him move. It was absolutely necessary that cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn't do anything t...

Men and Masculinity Quotes

A German measured Billy's upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They looked at other American bodies no...

Literature and Writing Quotes

All this happened, more or less. The war parts anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to...