Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout.

World War Two had certainly made everyone very tough.

On an average day, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.' So it goes. 'In...

No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote. The

It had to be done, Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden. I know, said Billy. That's war. I know. I'm not complaining. It must have been hell on the ground. It was, said Billy...

Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor....

He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.He says.Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips...

Billy now leaned over that parapat, looked down at all the people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors. They were a lot of fun.

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...

Me and Mike, ve vork in mine. Holy shit, ve have good time. Vunce a veek ve get our pay. Holy shit, no vork next day.

myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time. This

Listen - on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself...

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and...

Campbell was an ordinary-looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was...

The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a...

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.