Cat's Cradle Quotes & Sayings

His fingers made the string figure called a 'cat's cradle. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's a small world." ... "When you put it in a cemetery it is. — Kurt Vonnegut

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are. — Kurt Vonnegut

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. — Kurt Vonnegut

And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?"
"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! — Kurt Vonnegut

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with — Kurt Vonnegut

No damn cat, no damn Cradle. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokonists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, "Life is sure funny sometimes."
"And sometimes it isn't," said Marvin Breed. — Kurt Vonnegut

The day you give priority to bogus ethics over human reactions, you become a loser. Human reactions are priceless. Rules should never, ever stifle emotions. Tennis is a very human game facing a great danger that it will be strangulated in a cat's cradle of unnecessary or inhumane rules. — Ted Tinling

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon, Little boy blue and the man in the moon. "When you coming home, dad?" "I don't know when, But we'll get together then. You know we'll have a good time then. — Harry Chapin

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. — Jeanette Winterson

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization. — Larry Niven

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C — Kurt Vonnegut

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. — Kurt Vonnegut

Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle. — David Quammen

One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now! — Sylvia Townsend Warner

A pissant is somebody who thinks he's so damn smart, he can never 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. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better. — Kurt Vonnegut

As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [ ... ] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up. — Kurt Vonnegut

Little Newt snorted. "Religion!"
"Beg your pardon?" Castle said.
"See the cat?" asked Newt. "See the cradle? — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's ... "
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle. — Kurt Vonnegut

Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on? — Kurt Vonnegut

It's nice to be nice. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The fortifications have never been attacked, nor has any sane man ever proposed any reason why they should be attacked. They have never defended anything. Fourteen hundred persons are said to have died while building them. Of these fourteen hundred, about half are said to have been executed in public for substandard zeal. — Kurt Vonnegut

See the cat? See the cradle? — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No damn cat, and no damn cradle. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.