Cat's Cradle

“Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.So be it.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you.”

“[It] was about the end of the world in the year 2000 ... It told how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off.”

“There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'”

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”

“We talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.”

“[Dr. Asa Breed] said, the trouble with the world was... that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said that if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”

“What is the secret of life?” I asked."Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it.”

“Ah, God," says Bokonon, "what an ugly city every city is.”

“My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.”

“She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.”

“Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”

“I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.”

“Naomi Faust (secretary): “I’m indestructible. And even if I did fall, Christmas angels would catch me.”Dr Asa Breed (science administrator): “They’ve been known to miss.””

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

“Round and round and round we spin,With feet of lead and wings of tin...”

“There was one [conversation with Dr. Hoenikker] where he bet I couldn't tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, 'God is love' ... He said, 'What is God? What is love?'”

“[Lyman Enders] Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure – offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ whenever he felt that he'd made a point.”

“As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."”

“It’s a small world," I observed."When you put it in a cemetery, it is.”

“Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”

““Pretty? ... Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.””

““Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.””

““She said his mind was turned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.””

“The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels – tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wondering womankind, all wondering children.”

“My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.”

“The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”

“... I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.”

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”

“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”

“It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping tension between the two high at all times.”

“Never index your own book.”

“Never had I seen a human being better adjusted to such a humiliating physical handicap. I shuddered with admiration.”

“A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.”

“He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.”He reported his principal occupation as: “Being dead.””

“The San Lorenzan National Anthem. Its melody was "Home on the Range." The words had been written in 1922 by Lionel Boyd Johnson, by Bokonon. The words were these: "Oh, ours is a land / Where the living is grand, / And the men are fearless as sharks; / The women are pure, / And we always are sure / That our children will all toe their marks. / San, San Lo-ren-zo! / What a rich, lucky island are we! / Our enemies quail, / For they know they will fail / Against people so reverent and free."”

“Every greedy, unreasonable dream I’d ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. There, God love her warm and creamy soul, was peace and plenty forever.”

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's...""No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.”

“Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”

““Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”

“Tiger got to hunt,Man got to tell himself he understand.”

“My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?""Don't try," [Castle] said. "Just pretend you understand.”

“Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay in between. Such music from such a woman could only be the case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.”

“Little Newt snorted. “Religion!”“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?””

“If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die – in the year 3010.”

“He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards.”

““Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.””

“Pay no attention when I laugh .. I'm a notorious pervert in that respect.”

““It is not possible to make a mistake,” she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not.”

“Science is magic that works.”

“I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.”

“I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.”

“I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.""The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.”

“When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“"Now I will destroy the whole world." ... It’s what Bokonists always say when they are about to commit suicide.”

“God never wrote a good play in His life.”

“I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?""Nothing."”

“The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.”

“Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.”

““History,” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!””

“This wreath I bring is a gift from the people of one country to the people of another. Never mind which countries, think of people…”

“There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. ... [T]he sun became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.”

“And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.And He went away.”

““He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.””

“It's all so simple, that's all. It solves so much for so many, so simply.”

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'”

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

““As far as I know, Bokononism is the only religion that has any commentary on midgets.””

“The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world.”

“If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”

“Nothing in this book is true.*Harmless untruths”

“All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”