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She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”
“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”
“Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt. “Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.
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.”
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor.
“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
“It is not possible to make a mistake,”
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.
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.
‘Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”’”
Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.
