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.

Newt did not tell me who his girl friend was. But about two weeks after he wrote to me everybody in the country knew that her name was Zinka — plain Zinka. Apparently she didn’t have a last name.

Zinka was a Ukrainian midget, a dancer with the Borzoi Dance Company. As it happened, Newt saw a performance by that company in Indianapolis, before he went to Cornell. And then the company danced at Cornell. When the Cornell performance was over, little Newt was outside the stage door with a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses.

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.

“Do you find people to be about the same at heart, wherever you go?”
He looked at his wife, making sure she had heard the question, then turned back to me. “About the same, wherever you go,” he agreed.

It’s practically like a trip to Europe, there are so many things to see,

Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead