Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward -- always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn't that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. 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.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
Slaughterhouse-Five, p.412 in the Library of America
Novels & Stories 1963-1973 omnibus
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