Cat's Cradle

“Maturity, the way I understand it,” he told me, “is knowing what your limitations are.”

He wasn’t far from Bokonon in defining maturity. “Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats.

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.

Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is!
“Ah, God,” says Bokonon, “what an ugly city every city is!”

I don't do anything but sit around and remember sad things and pity myself.

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

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [

“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”
“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,” the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. “Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”
“I missed that,” I murmured.
“I saw that,” said Sandra. “About two days ago.”
“That’s right,” said the bartender.
“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.”

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

Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebbs’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done.