Vonneguts Cats Cradle Quotes

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A lover's a liar,
To himself he lies,
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters their eyes! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

After the thing 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? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out. ~ Jay Griffiths

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

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization. ~ Larry Niven

Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Live by the foma(Harmless untruths) that make you brave
and kind and healthy and happy. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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

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. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You never know if happy memories are going to become sad ones. They glow and shine in the vast realms of our subconscious, making that part of our brain feel like it's filled with glitter. We pick them up and cradle them like expensive cats, or wriggle into them like they are jumpers we've left to warm on a radiator. Until the day when, for one reason or another, life can suddenly make this happy memory into a sad memory instead. Good memories exist in the naivety of not knowing any better. ~ Holly Bourne

His fingers made the string figure called a 'cat's cradle. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You get what you pay for. ~ Gabriel Biel

One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now! ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath. ~ Charles Stross

When the windowpanes start to turn from black to gray, my sisters cradle themselves around me, rocking me like the sea until I can taste the salt of our tears ~ Sarah Miller

I'd found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary. And I played the same part again and again and again. ~ Felicia Day

A voice spoke. It sounded like a lion would speak, if it could talk.
I WARNED YOU!
In a way that would probably have been comic to watch, Lucinda and I turned, slowly, to see Spider the cat sitting between us and the door.
'The cat just spoke,' said Lucinda blankly.
'I know,' I said.
'Cats don't talk.'
'I know that, too.'
I'm not a cat. And I told you to stay away from here. ~ Emma L. Adams

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis

A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave. ~ John Dyer

It is far more important to love your wife than to love God, and I will tell you why. You cannot help him, but you can help her. You can fill her life with the perfume of perpetual joy. It is far more important that you love your children than that you love Jesus Christ. And why? If he is God you cannot help him, but you can plant a little flower of happiness in every footstep of the child, from the cradle until you die in that child's arms. Let me tell you to-day it is far more important to build a home than to erect a church. The holiest temple beneath the stars is a home that love has built. And the holiest altar in all the wide world is the fireside around which gather father and mother and the sweet babes. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The cats were relaxing in a patch of sunlight on the rug without a thought in their sleek brown heads. What matter to them that it was Sunday-or even Thursday? Every day was Today in their scheme of things, and there was no such thing as Yesterday or Tomorrow. ~ Lilian Jackson Braun

There're all sorts of cats - just like there're all sorts of people. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was looking at pictures of cats laying out on the beach and I thought, "Cats hate water, so why would they like the beach?" But then I realized that cats like to just lay around and lounge and be lazy, and what better place to do that than on the beach? ~ Bethany Cosentino

Cats are like witches. They don't fight to kill, but to win. There is a difference. There's no point in killing an opponent. That way, they won't know they've lost, and to be a real winner you have to have an opponent who is beaten and knows it. There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure. ~ Terry Pratchett

'Tell Suzie she's a lucky cat.' Have sexier words ever been spoken? ~ Ally Carter

I was probably 15 when I started going to the studio with the older cats in my neighborhood. They heard me rap outside one time; I was just freestyling. And they invited me to the studio. It's good when you're accepted, no matter what crowd. That's the first step of believing you can do whatever you feel like putting your mind to. ~ Nayvadius Cash

At the bottom of every leaf-stem is a cradle, and in it is an infant germ; the winds will rock it, the birds will sing to it all summer long, but the next season it will unfold and go alone. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace. ~ Michael Dirda

I like winter and I like the dark and I like cats and I like the rain and I like walking up mountains and sitting at the top in the fog . That's all I need to know about my life right now. It's pretty simple ~ Annabel Pitcher

Big Cyndi is six-six and on the planetoid side of three hundred pounds, the former intercontinental tag-team wrestling champion with Esperanza, aka Big Chief Mama to Esperanza's Little Pocahontas. Her head was cube shaped and topped with hair spiked to look like the Statue of Liberty on a bad acid trip. She wore more makeup than the cast of Cats, her clothing form-fitted like sausage casing, her scowl the stuff of sumos. ~ Harlan Coben

We have to let the Warrior Code rule our hearts. The death of a warrior does not mean victory. ~ Erin Hunter

Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth, so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat's teeth, was frozen in a shooter's snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if, after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying. 'Yeah, ~ Stephen King

The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge - unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare - almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The ~ Milton Friedman

The bible is the cradle that holds the Christ, without him it is nothing more than wood and straw. ~ Martin Luther

LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN
LET ME IN LET ME I-
Oh, uh, hello
I did not expect an answer
I did not expect an entrance
I did not expect this room to be so unbelievably dull
So, uh, goodbye ~ Francesco Marciuliano

She was not, herself, hugely in favor of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn't exactly difficult. Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they'd been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just because they'd got the label which said "mother", everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said "child" ... ~ Terry Pratchett

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona's theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. ~ Robin McKinley

A woman with a huge angry short-haired tabby in her arms came through from the surgery.

The newly named Lucy's fur rose. She made a noise that suggested she had come to the boil. The tabby suddenly let out a yell. Dogs made ambiguous comments in their throats.

"Oh Lor'!" said the newcomer. She grinned at Mr. Whipplestone. "Better make ourselves scarce," she said, and to her indignant cat: "Shut up, Bardolph, don't be an ass. ~ Ngaio Marsh

Nana acts like a stray cat, wild, free, and proud ... But inside her heart, she houses a wound. Dense as I am, i thought that. This trait of hers was a part of her charm as well..but she never realized how much pain it brought her ... -Nana Komatsu ~ Ai Yazawa

What is easily the most dangerous spot cats choose for sleeping? Beneath our feet-sprawled out in hallways or in doorways, tails predictably extended just to be stepped on. ~ Arnold Hano

As it is with every Life experience,
from the cradle to the grave,
Curiosity, is the culprit,
and always leads the way. ~ D. O'Brien

I'm tired of being your scratching post," he growled. "From now on, sharpen your claws on someone else." - Bumblestripe ~ Erin Hunter

We have one cat. I had eight cats and six dogs in Los Angeles. ~ Rue McClanahan