Cat’s Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut

Buy the Book Here (paperback)

The Official Kurt Vonnegut Website

Cat’s Cradle was written by Kurt Vonnegut and published in 1963.  Below are various excerpts from the book.  All quotes provided below may be cited as Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (United States: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, January 2006).

Quick-Jump

1  THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

Jonah (p. 1)

Call me Jonah.  My parents did, or nearly did.  They called me John.

2  NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

3  FOLLY

Only Fools Know God (p. 5)

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

4  A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

The First Sentence in The Books of Bokonon (p. 5)

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

Founded on Lies (pp. 5–6)

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

5  LETTER FROM A PRE-MED

Made-up Games or Real Ones (p. 11)

Making the cat’s cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to playing what anybody else would call a game.  He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.  In a scrapbook my sister Angela used to keep up, there was a clipping from Time magazine where somebody asked Father what games he played for relaxation, and he said, ‘Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?’

6  BUG FIGHTS

Tipping His Wife (p. 14)

And then, when she cleared off the table, she found a quarter and a dime and three pennies by Father’s cup.  He’d tipped her.

“I Wonder About Turtles” (pp. 15–16)

Science Has Now Known Sin (p. 17)

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.’

7  THE ILLUSTRIOUS HOENIKKERS

8  NEWT’S THING WITH ZINKA

9  VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES

10  SECRET AGENT X-9

11  PROTEIN

Breed’s Commencement Address (p. 24)

The Secret of Life (p. 25)

“What is the secret of life?” I asked.

“I forget,” said Sandra.

“Protein,” the bartender declared.  “They found out something about protein.”

“Yeah,” said Sandra, “that’s it.”

12  END OF THE WORLD DELIGHT

Government Perverts Science (p. 26)

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another.  Said he didn’t want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore.

13  THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE

George Minor Moakely: An Unremorseful Murderer (p. 29)

14  WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES

15  MERRY CHRISTMAS

Too Much Thinking? (p. 33)

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

16  BACK TO KINDERGARTEN

Magic! (p. 36)

17  THE GIRL POOL

18  THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH

19  NO MORE MUD

20  ICE-NINE

21  THE MARINES MARCH ON

22  MEMBER OF THE YELLOW PRESS

23  THE LAST BATCH OF BROWNIES

24  WHAT A WAMPETER IS

What a Wampeter Is (p. 52)

Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail.  Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiritual nebula.  The orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spirituak orbits, naturally.  It is souls and not bodies that revolve.

25  THE MAIN THING ABOUT DR. HOENIKKER

26  WHAT GOD IS

What is God? What is Love? (p. 55)

“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true.  So I told him, ‘God is love.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘What is God?  What is love?’ ”

27  MEM FROM MARS

28  MAYONNAISE

29  GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

30  ONLY SLEEPING

31  ANOTHER BREED

32  DYNAMITE MONEY

Busy, Busy, Busy (pp. 65–66)

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

33  AN UNGRATEFUL MAN

34  VIN-DIT

35  HOBBY SHOP

36  MEOW

Ethical Nihilism (pp. 77–79)

During my trip to Ilium and to points beyond—a two-week expedition bridging Christmas—I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free.  My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes.  He was no close friend of mine.  I had met him at a cocktail party where he presentd himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War.  He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some.

When I returned to my apartment, still twanging with the puzzling spiritual implications of the unclaimed stone angel in Ilium, I found my apartment wrecked by nihilistic debauch.  Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.

He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:

I have a kitchen.

But it is not a complete kitchen.

I will not be truly gay

Until I have a

Dispose-all.

There was another message, written in lipstick in feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed.  It said:  “No, no, no, said Chicken-licken.”

There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck.  It said, “Meow.”

I have not seen Krebbs since.  Nonetheless, I sense that he was my karass.  If he was, he served it as a wrang-wrang.  A wrang-wrang, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang’s own life, to an absurdity.

I might have been vaguely inclined to dismiss the stone angel as meaningless, and to go from there to the meaninglessness of all.  But after I saw what Krebbs had done, in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism was not for me.

Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist.  It was Krebb’s mission, whether he knew it or nor, to disenchant me with that philosophy.  Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done.

37  A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL

38  BARRACUDA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

39  FATA MORGANA

40  HOUSE OF HOPE AND MERCY

41  A KARASS BUILT FOR TWO

42  BICYCLES FOR AFGHANISTAN

Granfalloon (pp. 91–92)

Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.  Other examples of granfalloons are the Cmmunist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

43  THE DEMONSTRATOR

Punishment in San Lorenzo (p. 93)

How Kids Act (p. 95)

“Yeah.  There was a black velvet curtain in front of it and you had to pull the curtain back to see.  And there was a note pinned to the curtain that said children weren’t supposed to look.”

“But kids did,” said Crosby.  “There were kids down there, and they all looked.”

“A sign like that is kist catnip to kids,” said Hazel.

“How did the kids react when they say the person [wax figure] on the hook?” I asked.

“Oh,” said Hazel, “they reacted just about the way grownups did.  They just looked at it and didn’t say anything, just moved on to see what the next thing was.”

44  COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS

45  WHY AMERICANS ARE HATED

The Highest Form of Treason (p. 98)

“The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton, “is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do.  Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.”

“I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.”

People are hated a lot of places.  Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from the penalty.  But the loyalty board didn’t pay any attention to that.  All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.”

46  THE BOKONONIST METHOD FOR HANDLING CAESAR

Render Unto Caeser No Attention (p. 101)

Bokonon’s paraphrase was this:

“Pay no attention to Caeser.  Caeser doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”

47  DYNAMIC TENSION

48  JUST LIKE SAINT AUGUSTINE

49  A FISH PITCHED UP BY AN ANGRY SEA

50  A NICE MIDGET

51  O.K., MOM

52  NO PAIN

53  THE PRESIDENT OF FABRI-TEK

54  COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS

55  NEVER INDEX YOUR OWN BOOK

56  A SELF-SUPPORTING SQUIRREL CAGE

Philip Castle Does Not Know What Anarchism Is (p. 124)

57  THE QUEASY DREAM

People Seize and Re-seize San Lorenzo (pp. 125–126)

58  TRANNY WITH A DIFFERENCE

59  FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

60  AN UNDERPRIVILEGED NATION

Expiriment With Communism (p. 133)

“During the idealistic phase of McCabe’s and Johnson’s reorganization of San Lorenzo, it was announced that the country’s total income would be divided among all adult persons in equal shares,” wrote Philip Castle.  “The first and only time this was tried, each share came to between six and seven dollars.”

61  WHAT A CORPORAL WAS WORTH

62  WHY HAZEL WASN’T SCARED

63  REVERENT AND FREE

64  PEACE AND PLENTY

65  A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO

Minton’s Whooping Lie (p. 143)

66  THE STRONGEST THING THERE IS

You Will Be the Next President (p. 146)

“You,” he said to Frank hoarsely, “you—Franklin Hoenikker—you will be the next President of San Lorenzo.  Science—you have science.  Science is the strongest thing there is.[”]

67  HY-U-O-OOK-KUH!

Burning Questions (p. 147)

The Crosbys and I were both upset.  Our consternation was expressed in questions we had to have answered at once.  The Crosbys wanted to know who Bokonon was.  They were scandalized by the idea that anyone should be opposed to “Papa” Monzano.

Irrelevantly, I found that I had to know at once who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been.

68  HOON-YERA MORA-TOORZ

The Hundred Martyrs to Democracy (p. 149)

I asked the driver who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been.  The boulevard we were going down, I saw, was called the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.

The driver told me that San Lorenzo had declared war on Germany and Japan an hour after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

San Lorenzo conscripted a hundred men to fight on the side of democracy.  These hundred men were put on a ship bound for the United States, where they were to be armed and trained.

The ship was sunk by a German submarine right outside of Bolivar harbor.

69  A BIG MOSAIC

Photography (p. 151)

“Do you want to take my photograph, too?”

“Do you mind?”

“I think, therefore I am, therefore I am photographable.”

Paths to Happiness (p. 152)

“I’m also rich.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“If you want and expert opinion, money doesn’t necessarily make people happy.”

“Thanks for the information. You’ve just saved me a lot of trouble.  I was just about to make some money.”

“How?”

“Writing.”

“I wrote a book once.”

70  TUTORED BY BOKONON

Drug Salesman or Writer (p. 153)

“I’m not a drug salesman.  I’m a writer.”

“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”

71  THE HAPPINESS OF BEING AN AMERICAN

72  THE PISSANT HILTON

73  BLACK DEATH

74  CAT’S CRADLE

75  GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCWEITZER

76  JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

77  ASPERIN AND BOKO-MARU

78  RING OF STEEL

Better and Better Lies (p. 172)

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.

A Form of Treason (p. 173)

So I said good-bye to government,

And I gave my reason:

That a really good religion

Is a form of treason.

The Yin and the Yang Need Each Other (p. 175)

“McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless.  ‘Papa’ Monzano understands that, too.”

79  WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE

80  THE WATERFALL STRAINERS

81  A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER

82  ZAH-MAH-KI-BO

83  DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT

84  BLACKOUT

85  A PACK OF FOMA

Stanley on The Books of Bokonon (p. 190)

Stanley pretended not to know what I was talking about.  And then he grumbled that The Books of Bokonon were filth.  And then he insisted that anyone who read them should die on the hook.  And then he brought be a copy from Frank’s bedside table.

The Cosmogony of Bokononism (pp. 190–191)

86  TWO LITTLE JOGS

87  THE CUT OF MY JIB

88  WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT

Being a Ruler is Against Their Religion (p. 198)

Frank was mystified.  “Why would anybody shoot you?”

“So he could get to be President.”

Frank shook his head.  “Nobody in San Lorenzo wants to be President,” he promised me.  “It’s against their religion.”

89  DUFFLE

90  ONLY ONE CATCH

91  MONA

What Bokononists Say When Meeting a Shy Person (p. 203)

It is not possible to make a mistake.

92  ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST BOKO-MARU

93  HOW I ALMOST LOST MY MONA

Don’t Be a Sin-wat (p. 208)

“As your husband, I’ll want all your love for myself.”

She stared at me with widening eyes.  “A sin-wat!”

“What was that?”

“I sin-wat!” she cried.  “A man who wants all of somebody’s love.  That’s very bad.”

94  THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

What Bokononists Consider Sacred (p. 211)

“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after a while.

“Not even God, as near as I can tell.”

“Nothing?”

“Just one thing.”

I made some guesses.  “The ocean?  The sun?”

“Man,” said Frank.  “That’s all.  Just man.”

95  I SEE THE HOOK

96  BELL, BOOK, AND CHICKEN IN A HATBOX

97  THE STINKING CHRISTIAN

Science is Magic That Works (p. 218)

“Science is magic that works.”

98  LAST RITES

99  DYOT MEET MAT

The Last Rites of Bokononism (pp. 220–222)

100  DOWN THE OUBLIETTE GOES FRANK

101  LIKE MY PREDECESSORS, I OUTLAW BOKONON

102  ENEMIES OF FREEDOM

103  A MEDICAL OPINION ON THE EFFECTS OF A WRITERS’ STRIKE

A Writers Strike (p. 231)

“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses.  Would you support it?”

“No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that.  When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

104  SULFATHIAZOLE

105  PAIN-KILLER

106  WHAT BOKONONISTS SAY WHEN THEY COMMIT SUICIDE

Now I Will Destroy the Whole World (p. 238)

“Pain, ice, Mona—everything.  And then ‘Papa’ said, ’Now I will destroy the whole world.’ ”

“What did he mean by that?”

“It’s what Bokononists always say when they are about to commit suicide.”

107  FEAST YOUR EYES!

108  FRANK TELLS US WHAT TO DO

109  FRANK DEFENDS HIMSELF

110  THE FOURTEENTH BOOK

111  TIME OUT

112  NEWT’S MOTHER’S RETICULE

113  HISTORY

History (p. 252)

“History!” writes Bokonon.  “Read it and weep!”

114  WHEN I FELT THE BULLET ENTER MY HEART

115  AS IT HAPPENED

116  THE GRAND AH-WHOOM

117  SANCTUARY

118  THE IRON MAIDEN AND THE OUBLIETTE

The Purpose of Existence (p. 265)

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.”  And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man.  Mud as man alone could speak.  God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke.  Man blinked.  “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“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.

119  MONA THANKS ME

120  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

121  I AM SLOW TO ANSWER

122  THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON

123  OF MICE AND MEN

124  FRANK’S ANT FARM

125  THE TASMANIANS

126  SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON

127  THE END

Copyright © 1963 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

All rights reserved