"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 the 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."
"Aristotle, like many after him, selfishly proclaimed that the earth was at the centre of the universe and all other objects in the sky rotated around us. 100 years later, Ptolemy enhanced this model by saying that the earth was indeed fixed at the centre of the universe and was surrounded by a series of spheres in which particular objects in the sky rotated. The innermost sphere contained the moon, the next held Mercury, then Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn approriately. Finally, there was an outer sphere in which all the other stars in the sky were fixed, almost like a background canvas with the stars painted on. Naturally, this model of an earth-centred universe left plenty of room outside the outer sphere for heaven and hell."