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.”

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

So it goes.

We Bokonists believe that humanity isorganized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon.

A seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon . Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

Every passing hour brings the Solar Systemforty-three thousand miles closer to GlobularCluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.