Quotes from The Sirens of Titan

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everyone. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Take care of the people, and god almighty will take care of himself.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“All was forgiven.

All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep.

"Beautiful," he whispered.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Just 'cause something makes you feel better than anything else, that don't mean it's good for you.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin -- one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

“It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from The Sirens of Titan

About the author

Popular quotes

“Japan

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It’s the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

“I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying

“I doona want to be loved because I’m Undead. No more than ye would want to be rejected for being mortal.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, quote from All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire

“Clever of you, Hemul. But, on the other hand, think how lonely the Groke is because nobody likes her, and she hates everybody. The Contents is perhaps the only thing she has. Would you now take that away from her too -- lonely and rejected in the night?" Sniff became more and more affected and his voice trembled. "Cheated out of her only possession by Thingumy and Bob." He blew his nose and couldn't go on.”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Finn Family Moomintroll

“The work of each individual contributes to a totality, and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives—past and present and to come—forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole? Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Robots and Empire

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