"You don’t know what it is to reach my age, look back, and realize that you don’t remember much of it: then to look forward and know that many years still lie ahead of you..."

"“To know who you are without any delusions or sympathy is a moment of revelation that no one experiences unscathed.”"

"Eragon: Define normal."

"Eragon: Should I kill him?"

"Eragon: I will fight when needed, revel when there's an occasion, mourn when there is grief, and die if my time comes...but I won't let anybody use me against my will."

"Eragon: If I drank that much mead it would kill me!"

"Saphira: The worth is in the act. Your worth halts when you surrender the will to change and experience life"

"Eragon: My heart died a while back."

"Eragon: Saphira, where are you? Let's have some fun!"

"Saphira: No hunter of the sky should end his days as prey. Better to die on the wing than pinned to the ground."

"Saphira: Together we can cast spells that are beyond either of us."

"Saphira: It's funny to see a hatchling like you beaten by the old one."

"Saphira: If anything happens, I'm going to pin you to my back and never let you off."

""Are you Saphira?" She looked at him with intelligent eyes. Deep in his mind he felt her satisfaction. Yes."

"That's the problem! I've been choosing male names. You are a she!"

"After all, how can a mere dragon expect to tell a man like yourself what to do? In fact, everyone should stand in awe of your brilliance of finding the only dead end."

"I'm not having children." "That's the best part," she said. "I'll have them for you." "You know what I meant," said Bean. "It's not done by kissing, so you're safe so far."

"Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying in this box?"

"You saved the world. All of humanity is your progeny. And yet... it is empty, isn't it? They didn't take it away from you the way they took my work from me. But time has taken it away. It's in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?"

"My friendships were not... transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did all my friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and our hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me."

"We don't always get the leader that we want," said Graff. "But sometimes we get to choose among the leaders that we have."

"You fight dirty." "I fight like a girl."

"Your life is going to be short," said Anton. "And at the end, there will be pain, physical and emotional. You will grow too large for this world, too large for your heart."

"Ignorance is not a tragedy," said Anton, "merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness."

"Is that the answer?" - Anna: "That depends....what's the question?"

"Dear, I have no objection to anything!"

"I don't get off till 7.00 ; Brian: It's not when it's HOW!"

"Garbage, you know, is very revealing. Beats the shit out of Tarot cards."

"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. 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 wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. (p. 60)"

""Poo-tee-weet?" (p. 215; closing words)"

"My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust. (p. 210)"

"Billy turned on his television set, clicking its channel selector around and around. He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it goes. (pp. 199-200)"

"Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, "I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war." (p. 193"

"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. (p. 192)"

""You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?" Trout asked Billy. "No." "The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him. He thinks he's standing on thin air. He'll jump a mile." (p. 175)"

"“I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.” Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified. Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage. (p. 172)"

""Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control. (p. 171)"

"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. (p. 167)"

""Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut," murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. "Go take a flying fuck at the moon." (p. 147)"

"Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times. (p. 129)"

"An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (p. 125)"

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. (p. 122)"

"It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of 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! (pp. 108-110)"

"You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'" (p. 106)"

"How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. (p. 105)"

"She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all. (p. 102)"

"[Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time … He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore," said Rosewater. (p. 101)"

"The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. (p. 96)"

"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."