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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
I’m a very privileged character. I don’t have to go to class any more. I was flunked out last week.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. I am proof of that.” 8
“The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight.”
“Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.” “You don’t seem to agree.” “I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”
‘This here’s a research laboratory. Research means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to research for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?’ Yes, yes!”
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
“Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.
He had had a dazzling talent for spending millions without increasing mankind’s stores of anything but chagrin.
The Fata Morgana, the mirage of what it would be like to be loved by Mona Aamons Monzano, had become a tremendous force in my meaningless life.
“I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”
“ ‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “ ‘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.’”
A fish pitched up By the angry sea, I gasped on land, And I became me.
Standing next to her was a pilot. He was not looking at her, but he had a perspiring radiance that I attributed to his being so near to her.
When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything—and I advise you to do the same.”
So I said good-bye to government, And I gave my reason: That a really good religion Is a form of treason.
They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”
“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
A lover’s a liar, To himself he lies. The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!
“I wonder what happened to a lot of things,” said Angela. The question echoed back through time— woeful, lost.
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.
I was able, while mooning at her across the space that separated our beds, to imagine that behind her marvelous eyes lurked mysteries as old as Eve.
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.
“He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”
“As the poet said, Mom, ‘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,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
