Cat's Cradle (1963)

Full title: Cat's Cradle, Or Ice-Nine

• Anyone who cannot understand how a useful religion can be based on lies will not understand this book either.

• Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

• 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.
  • Book of 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.

• Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'
  • This is actually a misquotation of the poem "Maud Muller" by John Greenleaf Whittier: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

• Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
  • Despite having a definite source, this particular line is misquoted on the internet in many divergent ways, with "Unexpected", "Strange", and "Unusual" commonly substituted for "Peculiar"

• 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.

• "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."

• See the cat? See the cradle?

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

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

• "I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done."
  "Nice going, God!"
  "Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have."
  "I feel very unimportant compaired to You."
  "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."
  • Part of the Bokononist last rites.

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965)

Full title: God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine

• I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.
  • Eliot Rosewater to a group of science fiction writers!

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

• This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

• So it goes.
  • Recurring statement throughout the novel, based on what Tralfamadorians say whenever someone or something dies.

• I held up my right hand and I made her a promise.
  'Mary,' I said, 'I don't think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
  'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.
  She was my friend after that.

• Listen:
  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

• As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

• The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State.

• You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock "My God, my God—" I said to myself. "It's the Children's Crusade."

• The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
  But the Gospels actually taught this:
  Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

• An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.
  That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

• Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, "I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war."

• There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

• Poo-tee-weet?

• Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

• I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
  It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
  Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
  So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
  What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
  And all music is.

• Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

• Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.

• Roses are red and ready for plucking
  You're sixteen and ready for high school.

• To be
  the eyes
  and ears
  and conscience
  of the Creator of the Universe,
  you fool.
  • Kilgore Trout's unwritten reply to the question "What is the purpose of life?"

• Listen:
  The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me.
  "The big show is inside my head," I said

• We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
  • Kilgore Trout's epitaph

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)

• The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.
  • "In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself"

• I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

• About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

• Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
  • "When I Was Twenty-One"

• The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

• A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

• Dear Reader: The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat's Cradle. A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I've written, a few of the speeches I made.

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976)

• I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please— a little less love, and a little more common decency."

• "'Hi Ho"'

• Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

• "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!"

Jailbird (1979)

• Sally In The Garden:

Sally in the garden,
Siftin' through the cinders,
Lifted up her arse,
And farted like a man,
The busting of her britches broke fifteen windows,
The cheeks of her ass went (bam, bam, bam)

• I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

• What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

• Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.
  The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my one-time hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious abuot him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.
  My stolen answer to Nixon was this: "Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir."

• You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed--so you were a good man just the same.

Bluebeard (1987)

• Belief is nearly the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not.

• What is literature but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

• Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

• I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Hocus Pocus (1990)

• I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.

• The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

• When asked what he thought about that he replied, "I had to laugh like hell".

• Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

• "I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said.
  "I wish we had all been born birds instead."

• Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

• How embarassing to be human.

Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

• As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

Cold Turkey (2004)

Quotes from the essay Cold Turkey at In These Times (10 May 2004)

• Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

• For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
  "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

• There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

• What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

• Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

• I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.
  Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

• If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?

• So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget.

• Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

A Man Without a Country (2005)

• George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

• Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

• During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if this was true or not.

• What is it, what can it possibly be about blowjobs and golf? - Martian Visitor

• If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.

• Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?

• Old Norweigian Proverb: Swedes have short dicks but long memories.

• My father said "When in doubt, castle."

I Love You, Madame Librarian

Original article from In These Times (6 August 2004)

• In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

• War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

• Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

• My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

• Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

• Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

Attributed

• All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.

• Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

• When you're dead, you're dead.

• Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

• High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

• History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

• I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

• I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

• If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

• If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

• If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

• “In case you haven’t noticed, we…dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything. Piece of cake.”

• It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

• It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry— or laugh.

• Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

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

• Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.

• The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

• The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

• True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

• You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

• We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

• We're not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.

• What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

• Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

• All writers...have pretty wives. Someone should look into this.

• (Speaking at Isaac Asimov's funeral, both of whom are humanists) Isaac is in heaven now, that was the funniest thing I could have said to a crowd of Humanists. God Forbid, Should I pass on sometime, may all of you say that Kurt is in Heaven too.

External links

• Kurt Vonnegut's website
• The Vonnegut Web
• Welcome to the Monkey House - a tribute website
• Kurt Vonnegut Corner
• Cold Turkey essay by Vonnegut online
• Address to the graduating class at Bennington College, 1970 By Vonnegut