Thursday, September 27, 2012

We're Reading Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Good Reads provides some of favorite quotes from Vonnegut's work:
The Sirens of Titan Quotes :
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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."

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

“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”

“Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia — what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!" -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“. . . 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Now, you can say your Daddy is right and the other little child's Daddy is wrong, 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.”

"All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.”

Discussion question: What is fate?

Do events happen for a reason?
Do you have to have faith to believe in Fate?
How is fate comforting?  Can it be a crutch?

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