Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle (1963)

39 Sourced Quotes

View all Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Kurt Vonnegut
How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

Kurt Vonnegut
There's love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

Kurt Vonnegut
Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

Kurt Vonnegut
If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.

Kurt Vonnegut
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 the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that nice old lady said to me. "Mr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him.

Kurt Vonnegut
On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar.

Kurt Vonnegut
I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies, but not that much.

Kurt Vonnegut
I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
We Bokonists 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.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.

Kurt Vonnegut
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

Kurt Vonnegut
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Kurt Vonnegut
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

Kurt Vonnegut
Having a yacht is a reason for being more cheerful than most.

Kurt Vonnegut
The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

Kurt Vonnegut
All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

Kurt Vonnegut
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

Kurt Vonnegut
We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.

Kurt Vonnegut
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

Kurt Vonnegut
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.

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

Kurt Vonnegut
The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

Kurt Vonnegut