Quotes from Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
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. -320
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as we all are. -233
The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells. -243
It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too. -312
But Boaz had decided that he needed a buddy far more than he needed a means of making people do exactly what he wanted them to. During the night, he had become very unsure of what he wanted people to do, anyway. Not to be lonely, not to be scared--Boaz had decided that those were the important things in life. A real buddy could help more than anything. -185
And then he remembered Stony Stevenson--his friend. He had had a friend, which was certainly a good thing. 'I had a friend,' said Malachi Constant into the microphone….His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship. -264
The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful. -265
Quotes from Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins (I read this on the Kindle, so be patient with "location numbers")
The safe margins of the day, still faintly visible during eventide, have been erased by night's dense gum, obscured by its wash of squid squirtings, pajama sauce, and the blue honey manufactured by moths. Is the night a mask, or is day merely night's prim disguise? Most of us are born in the night, and by night most will die. Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of fir. -284
The sun is rising like it isn't street legal. The sun is coming up sneaky. Finding not a single cloud behind which it might take cover, it seems hesitant, furtive, afraid to pop its clutch. -794
It's erythrophobia time. And as usual, your fear of blushing causes you to blush. But there's no pigment of guilt in the puccoon that reddens your cheeks. Instead of shame, you feel resentment. You would have operated differently had conditions been different. As it was, you were tricked by circumstance, cheated by history. Were you supposed to just surrender to the zeitgeist? Be a pebble? Go where you were kicked? -1266
Why aren't we as smart when we wake up as we are in our dreams? -1342
Perplexity lines your face like the type in an arrest warrant. 1337
…the major cards [of the Arcana] are chapters in the story of a quest. I'm talking the universal human quest for understanding and divine reunion. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the Fool or ends with him, because it's a loop anyhow, a cycle endlessly repeated. When the naive young Fool finally tumbrels over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he'll meet all the teachers and tempters--the tempters are teachers, too--and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. the Fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the Fool. A lot of folks don't know what's in that bag they're carrying. Andd they're all too willing to trade it for cash. Inside the bag, they have every tool they need to facilitate their life's journey, but they won't even open it up and glance inside. Subconsciously, the goal of all us out-of-control primates is essentially the same, but let me assure you of this: the only ones who'll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way. -1302
We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make sense of it; observing a "reality" that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories' we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and head soy state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the trite theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas and kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management? -1359
Life is full of surprises, most of which we could well do without. -1755
In the outside world, civilization is frequently and perhaps accurately perceived as a thin veneer over the rant and scrabble of an essentially savage species. -2792
'Everybody's waiting for something.'
'Yeah, and everybody's got to stop it. It's making 'em crazy. Worse, it's making 'em mediocre…Which is worse, having a boil lanced or sitting in the doctor's waiting room hour after hour, filling out forms, thumbing through those out-of-date magazines, sneezers and coughers spraying microbic wildlife at you, babies howling, hard-luck stories being traded like baseball cards? Better to be in the examination room learning the boil is actually a cancer than waiting your life away with unhappy companions on plastic-covered furniture.'
'For Christ's sake. I mean, Timbuktu, if it was so rich and glamorous, why did it turn into this, this--boneyard?'
'You might ask the same thing about Wall Street. Things run their course in the material world. -3369
'I really don't understand how you can be amused by this degradation.'
'Congratulations, hoptoad. Once again you've hit upon the wrong word. The theater of man is not always "amusing," but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh….They're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.' -3929
…progress as 'the victory of laughter over dogma.' Now there's a victory worth celebrating. -3991
At some eschatological moment...we may ride the currents to the stars, where, in the dimension of the over mind, we'll experience closure with the godhead, eventually to embark on even higher tides to even stranger destinations requiring even more unimaginable transformations. Meanwhile, at our present level of development, largely oblivious to our origins and our destination, we are half-asleep in frog pajamas. -4500
'But things are a mess.'
'Yes. Yes. I believe I just indicated as much. Isn't it grand? A gentleman named Horace Walpole once wrote that 'The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.' Extrapolating, we can say, then, that to the whole person, the person with a balanced view, the world is a tragicomedy. Ah, but virtually nobody in America thinks anymore; and nobody feels much either, beyond anger and resentment that they haven't been cut a wider slice of that prodigal pie that they've been deluded into believing not only exists but is rightfully theirs to share, regardless of their talents or virtues. What can you say about a population to whom the world is neither comedy nor tragedy but a sporting match in a seedy and extremely noisy arena, a littered rink where they might score if they're lucky or shrewd or ruthless enough, or go completely numb if they fail? Still, there's a roar.'
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