slaughterhouse-five

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty _ and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn__ have to write at all anymore if I didn__ want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don__ know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they__e through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn__ ask to be flowers and I didn__ ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five_I had a shutting-off feeling_that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .