“When princes flee battle, and knights turn free-lance, and barons rob pilgrims, what value has honor?"“Why, all the more, seeing how rare it has become.”

“Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.”

“In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.”

“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”

“Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.”

“The word 'free-lance', I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills.”