"Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut

Kindle edition and paperback.

• "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."
• "The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean."
• "Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be."
• "You're looking at the world's champion mistakemaker"
• "All the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
• "Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be found on lies, will not understant this book either."
• "She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing"
• "My book is going to emphasize the human rather than the technical side of the bomb."
• "Just give me the bare bones of your story."
• "She read it and said it was nothing but a piece of dirty rotten filth."
• "He had no use at all of the tricks and games and rules that other people made up."
• "Why would I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?"
• "His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen."
• "Maybe I did hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lived. People couldn't get at him because he just wasn't interested in people. I remember one time, about a year before he died, I tried to get him tell me something about my mother. He couldn't remember anything about her."
• "Mother cooked a big breakfast. And then, when she cleared off the table, she found a quarter and a dime and three pennies by Father's coffee cup. He'd tipped her."
• "I wonder about turtles. ... When they pull in their heads, do their spines buckle or contract?"
• "Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb"
• "People weren't his specialty."
• "Science has now known sin."
• "There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look."
• "The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control."
• "The trouble with the world was," she continued hesitantly, "that people were still superstitious instead of scientific."
• "What is the secret of life?" I asked. "Protein," the bartender declared.
• "End of the World Delight"
• "anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another."
• "I thought the worst of everyone, and I knew some pretty sordid things"
• "The mind reels"
• "My sick head wobbled on my stiff neck."
• "Dr Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning."
• "Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry."
• "You scientists think too much"
• "I think you'll find that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in orders."
• "Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." "Then I'm dumber than an eight-year-old," Miss Pefko mourned. "I don't even know what a charlatan is."
• "I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all."
• "We all missed a lot. We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarden."
• "I attempted to put my thoughts in order for a sensible interview. I found that my mental health had not improved."
• "I found that the public-relations centers of my brain had been suffocated by booze and burning cat fur. Every question I asked implied that the creators of the atomic bomb had been criminal accessories to murder most foul."
• "I gather you don't like scientist very much."
• "All your questions seemed aimed at getting me to admit that scientists are heartless, conscienceless, narrow boobies, indifferent to the fate of the rest of the human race, or maybe not really members of the human race at all."
• "I'm sick of people misunderstanding what a scientist is, what a scientist does . . . In this country most people don't even understand what pure research is."
• "Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country is doing it."
• "New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."
• "People suggest things all the time, but it isn't in the nature of a pure research-man to pay any attention to suggestions."
• "That's impossible." " You would say so, I would say so - practically everyone would say so. To Felix, in his playful way, it was entirely possible."
• "he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new"
• "The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight."
• "Pure research men work on what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people."
• "She gave me a frank and interesting reply, and a piquant smile to go with it."
• "I don't think he was knowable."
• "Re-search means look again, don't it?"
• "What is it they're trying to find again? Who lost what?"
• "Nobel Prize money bought it..." "Dynamite money." "What?" "Nobel invented dynamite."
• "how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is."
• "Life is sure funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't."
• "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."
• "That's why she married him. She said his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars. Crap."
• "My wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with."
• "The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy."
• "Crosby was of the opinion that dictatorships were often very good things. He wasn't a terrible person and he wasn't a fool. It suited him to confront the world with a certain barn-yard clownishness, but many of the things he had to say about undisciplined mankind were not only funny but true."
• "American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love."
• "She broke my heart. I didn't like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for."
• "A pissant is someone who thinks he's so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he's got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he'll tell you why you're wrong to like it."
• "My father was the father of the atom bomb."
• "So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all!"
• "Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing."
• "Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."
• "Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession."
• "Maturity is knowing what your limitations are."
• "Pay no attention when I laugh. I'm notorious pervert in that respect."
• "People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be."
• "And 250, 000 cigarettes and 3, 000 quarts of booze, and two wives and no wife. . . . And no love waiting for me anywhere. . . . And the listless life of an ink-stained hack. . . "
• "Science is magic that works."
• "I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies."
• "I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being heel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing."
• "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?" "In one of two ways, putrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system."
• "A lover's a liar, To himself he lies. The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!"
• "Feast your eyes!"
• "What hope can there be for mankind when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such a plaything as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?"
• "What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on earth, given the experience of the past million years?"
• "I gave up trying to stretch my brain when I-don't-know-how-old-I-was," Angela confessed, leaning on her broom. "I couldn't even listen to him when he talked about science. I'd just nod and pretend I was trying to stretch my brain, but that poor brain, as far as science went, didn't have any more stretch than an old garter belt."
• "Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be."
• "History! Read it and weep!"
•  - "I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays."
•  - "But they are murdered children all the same."
•  - "Then I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind."
• "Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns."
• "But if today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war, is today a day for a thrilling show?"
• "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away.
• "Death has never been quite so easy to come by."
• "He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless."
• "Her laugh was startlingly deep and raw."
• "I let my mind go blank. I closed my eyes. It was with deep, idiotic relief ..."
• "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been" ' "
• "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 for people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
• "a man's as big as what he hopes and thinks!"
• "The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our constitution."
• "The time for the final sentence has come."