Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan” Quotes (27 Quotes)

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.

Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

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.

In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space. The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness.

You are going to do this voluntarily, Mr. Constant, so that the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent can have a drama of dignified self-sacrifice to remember and ponder through all time.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

Low comedy, empty heroics and pointless death

Now they were regaining consciousness- were being treated to a cruel and lovely illusion.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

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.

Earl Moncrief, the butler, built his financial, procurement, and secret service organizations with the brute power of cash and a profound understanding of clever, malicious, discontented people who lived behind servile facades.

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.

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.

The righteously displeased crowds existed now in every part of the world. The total membership of the Churches of God the Utterly Indifferent was a good, round three billion. The young lions who had first taught the creed could now afford to be lambs, to contemplate such oriental mysteries as water trickling down a bell rope.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in the recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.

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.

He developed several hobbies that helped him to pass the time.

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.

He watched and recorded their subversive activites with love, amusement, and detachment.

There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.

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.

Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.