The Sirens of Titan A Novel

"Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

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.

It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

It was a politician’s gesture—a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone.

“Indianapolis, Indiana,” said Constant, “is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who’ll hang a white man for murdering an Indian—” said Constant, “that’s the kind of people for me.”

What drew him back to that sad place was a wish to leave it in good order. Sooner or later, someone else would come.

"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody." […] "Thank you for using me," she said to Constant, "even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody." "You’re welcome," said Constant.

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.

The International Committee for the Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic ward of a London hospital. "Thanks very much for the information," Winslow had told the committee. "Now I don’t have that lost feeling any more."

The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universal Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

"Just because something feels better than anything else," he said in his thoughts, "that don’t mean it’s good for you." […] The harmoniums in the caves of Mercury were crazy about good music, too. They had been feeding on one sustained note in the song of Mercury for centuries. When Boaz gave them their first taste of music, which happened to be Le Sacre du Printemps, some of the creatures actually died in ecstasy. […] His duty was to see that no creature crept too close to the apparatus. His duty, when a creature crept too close, was to peel the creature from the wall or floor, scold it, and paste it up again a hundred yards or more away.

"Don’t truth me," said Boaz in his thoughts, "and I won’t truth you." It was a plea he had made several times to Unk.

Dog wuzza Winston Niles Rumfoord’s dreat big mean chrono-synclastic infundibulated dog.

"Once upon a time, luck arranged things so that a baby named Malachi Constant was born the richest child on Earth. On the same day, luck arranged things so that a blind grandmother stepped on a rollerskate at the head of a flight of cement stairs, a policeman’s horse stepped on an organ-grinder’s monkey, and a paroled bank robber found a postage stamp worth nine hundred dollars in the bottom of a trunk in his attic. I ask you—is luck the hand of God?"

She had been shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.

“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. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now.” He looked around the room. “How do you keep track now, by the way—writing with a burnt match on the margins of a telephone directory?”

[The company] was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

He took the Gideon Bible that was in his room, and he started with the first sentence in Genesis. The first sentence in Genesis, as some people may know, is: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Noel Constant wrote the sentence in capital letters, put periods between the letters, divided the letters into pairs, rendering the sentence as follows: "I.N., T.H., E.B., E.G., I.N., N.I., N.G., G.O., D.C., R.E., A.T., E.D., T.H., E.H., E.A., V.E., N.A., N.D., T.H., E.E., A.R., T.H." […] His very first investment was International Nitrate. After that came Trowbridge Helicopter, Electra Bakeries, Eternity Granite, Indiana Novelty, Norwich Iron, National Gelatin, Granada Oil, Del-Mar Creations, Richmond Electroplating, Anderson Trailer, and Eagle Duplicating.

“United Hotcake preferred,” said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their money in six weeks, he advised them gravely to invest in this fictitious stock. Some people actually tried to follow his advice.

How your father never even threw a ball to you once—any kind of ball.

His mouth tasted like horseblanket purée.

and it should be remembered that the President gave the word “progress” a special flavor by pronouncing it prog-erse. He also flavored the words “chair” and “warehouse,” pronouncing them cheer and wirehouse. […] so you just hang on to those cheers. Meanwhile, why don’t you forget about those cheers in the wirehouse and think about progerse in space?’