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EVERY ONE NOW KNOWS how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul. Gimcrack religions were big business.
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Winston Niles Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum
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.
everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been."
"What an optimistic animal man is!" said Rumfoord rosily. "Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years—as though people were as well-designed as turtles!"
His mouth tasted like horseblanket purée.
There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.
His system was so idiotically simple that some people can’t understand it, no matter how often it is explained. The people who can’t understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.
"I was a victim of a series of accidents," he said. He shrugged. "As are we all," he said.
"Yessir—there’s a Martian for you," he said. "Won’t even get off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer."
"Luck," said Rumfoord up in his treetop, "is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.
I haven’t understood a single thing that’s happened to me since I reached Earth."
"All I can say," said Rumfoord from the cocoon, "is that I have tried my best to do good for my native Earth while serving the irresistible wishes of Tralfamadore.
"Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool’s errand, " said Salo, "has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand."
"You finally fell in love, I see," said Salo. "Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "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."
