Cat's Cradle

"Nothing in this book is true. "Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." — The Books of Bokonon 1:5 *Harmless untruths"

"We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon ... "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba."

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

"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. “I forget,” said Sandra. “Protein,” the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein." "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..."

"I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things ... Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him. ... Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth. ... I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."

"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? Baby don’t hurt me, Baby don’t hurt me, no more.’"

"[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."

"[Hazel Crosby's] obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a granfalloon Just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

"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."

"The highest possible form of treason," said [Horlick] Minton, "is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love." "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places." "People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out ... that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved."

"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..." "And?" "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, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; 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."