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“My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation. . .” 172

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” Darl 😭

poor little baby Vandaman, let him grieve openly!! Someone sit and talk with him!!

p. 198 - “Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.”
p. 215 - “[My father] was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”
finished book at 11:51PM on July 10, 2025

p. 185 - “Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of who they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design.”
p. 191 - “He knew very little about her, except that she was one more public demonstration that he was a superman.”

p. 170 - “. . . most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”
p. 182 - “Robert, the future Green Beret, was seventeen then. Billy liked him, but didn’t know him very well. Billy couldn’t help suspecting that there wasn’t much to know about Robert.”

quotes from the last few days of reading:
p. 160 - “It had been built as a shelter for pigs about to be butchered. Now it was going to serve as a home away from home for 100 American prisoners of war.”
p. 166 - “She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, he said he didn’t know. He was just trying to keep warm. ‘All the real soldiers are dead,’ she said. It was true. So it goes.”

memorable moments from today’s reading:
pg 112 - “She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”
pg 118 - “the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolute sure he isn’t well connected. . . There are right people to lynch.”

“It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.” the whole undoing of damage by watching the film backwards

miss justineau you absolute wonderful human being ☹️ literally already so sad and only four chapters in

i feel sick with how deep this book hits me good god i need a breather and a tea

literally crying over everyone coming together 😭 wish they could have known each other in better circumstances but so glad they can rely on each other now

silas’s graphic language thank you sir i needed someone to describe this sense of being in a way i understand. i too wish to explore someone’s innards.

me when silas has the same aversion for eggs as i do

T4T relationship PLEAASSSEEEE!!! I’m so into this book rn I have never related so closely to a main character