Cat's Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut

• “…Bokononists believe that humanity is organised into teams, teams that do God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon…”

~ Jonah

• “If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons, that person may be a member of your karass.”

~ From The Books of Bokonon

• “Men created the checkerboard; God created the karass.”

~ Bokonon

• "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.”

~ Newton Hoenikker

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

~ Newton Hoenikker

• “We talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about the 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 rich bastards who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.”

~ Jonah

• “He 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.”

~ Sandra

• “What is the secret of life?” I asked.

“I forget,” said Sandra. “Protein,” the bartender replied.

• My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

~ Jonah

• 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.

~ Jonah

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

~ Dr Asa Breed

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

~ Jonah

• Naomi Faust: “I’m indestructible. And even if I did fall, Christmas angels would catch me.”

Dr Asa Breed: “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.”

~ Dr Asa Breed

• 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 made a point.

~ Jonah

• “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

~ Bokonon

• “It’s a small world,” I observed.

“When you put it in a cemetery, it is.” ~ Marvin Breed

• Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokonists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

~ Jonah

• “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.”

~ Marvin Breed

• “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.”

~ Marvin Breed

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

~ Marvin Breed

• 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 Bokonists vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wondering womankind, all wondering children.

~ Jonah

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

~ Jonah

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

~ H. Lowe Crosby

• “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.”

~ Claire Minton

• “... 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.”

~ Claire Minton

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

~ Bokonon

• 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.

~ Jonah

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

~ Jonah

• “A pissant is somebody he 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.”

~ H. Lowe Crosby

• 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.

~ Jonah

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

~ Dr Julian Castle

• 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.

~ Jonah

• “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.”

~ Dr Julian Castle (about Dr Schlichter von Koenigswald)

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

~ Jonah (about Frank Hoenikker)

• I learned of the Bokononists cosmology, for instance, wherein Borasisi, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped Pabu would bear him a fiery child. But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and Borasisi threw them away in disgust. Those were the planets who circled their terrible father at a safe distance. The poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favourite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu’s favourite because it had people on it; and the people looked up to her and loved her and sympathised.

~ Jonah

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

~ Jonah

• “Science is magic that works.”

~ “Papa” Monzano

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

~ Dr von Koenigswald

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

~Jonah

• Dr von Koenigswald: “And then ‘Papa’ said, ‘Now I will destroy the whole world.’ ”

Jonah: “What did he mean by that?” Dr von Koenigswald: “It’s what Bokonists always say when they are about to commit suicide.”

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

~ Bokonon

• “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?… Nothing”

~ The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon

• In a messy world we were at least making out little corner clean.

~ Jonah

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

~ Jonah

• Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate that noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

~ Jonah

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

~ Mona (about Bokonon)

• “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.”

~ Jonah

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

~ Newton Hoenikker