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 that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments."
• "It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that."
• "Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward-always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all."
• "'How's the patient?' he asked Derby. 'Dead to the world.' 'But not actually dead.' 'No.' 'How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.'"

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

• "Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here. What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail."

THE BELL JAR

• "I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died."

FRANNY AND ZOOEY

• "'Jesus Christ almighty," he said. "Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.'"
• "'I wish to hell everyone'd just go home. I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life.'"

DE DAUMIER-SMITH'S BLUE PERIOD

• "The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid."

TEDDY

• "Teddy hesitated. 'I said "rather" embarrassing. I qualified it.' 'I'll qualify you, buddy, if you don't get the hell off that bag,' Mr. McArdle said."
• "'I hate you! I hate everybody in this ocean!'"
• "It would be interesting to meet his wife, also his dog Lindy. However, I would not like to own a dog myself."

WINTER TREES - 'For a Fatherless Son'

• "You will be aware of an absence, presently, / Growing beside you, like a tree, / A death tree, color gone"