# Quote — Kurt Vonnegut, 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 that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

- Author: [Kurt Vonnegut](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut.md)
- Book: [Slaughterhouse-Five](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/slaughterhouse-five.md)
- Page: 26
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five#Chapter_2) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/slaughterhouse-five/the-most-important

## More from this book

> 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)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/slaughterhouse-five/billy-had-a-framed.md)

> As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger — from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch thirty feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss. (p. 34)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/slaughterhouse-five/as-part-of-the.md)

> I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
>
> I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that. (p. 19)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kurt-vonnegut/slaughterhouse-five/i-have-told.md)