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I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.
Dr. Breed’s Secretary was standing on her desk in his outer office tying an accordion-pleated Christmas bell to the ceiling fixture. “Look here, Naomi,” cried Dr. Breed, “we’ve gone six months without a fatal accident! Don’t you spoil it by falling off the desk!”
“Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.
My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.
THIS IS A CHRISTIAN NATION! ALL FOOT PLAY WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE HOOK, said another sign. The sign was meaningless to me, since I had not yet learned that Bokononists mingled their souls by pressing the bottoms of their feet together.
“You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.
“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”
“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
“Are you a Bokononist?” I asked him. “I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.”
Did she represent the highest form of female spirituality? Or was she anesthetized, frigid—a cold fish, in fact, a dazed addict of the xylophone, the cult of beauty, and boko-maru? I shall never know.
