“She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].” (5)

“He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.” (11)

That’s what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, ‘Experimenting.’ (15)

The old man pulled his head indoors again, and never even asked later what all the fuss had been about. People weren’t his specialty. (17)

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. (18)

15. I think you’ll find that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others. (34)

17. “Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.”
“That’s very generous of General Forge and Foundry Company.”
“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.” (41)

19. “People suggest things all the time, but it isn’t in the nature of a pure-research man to pay any attention to suggestions. His head is full of projects of his own, and that’s the way we want it.” (42)

19. “That’s impossible.”
“You would say so, I would say so–practically everybody would say so. To Felix, in his playful way it was entirely possible. The miracle of Felix–and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere–was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.” (44)

20. I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing. (46)

22. “Pure research men work on what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people.” (49)

24. It is souls and not bodies that revolve. (52)

25. “I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things,” that nice old lady said to me. “Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren’t the main things with him.”
“What /were/ the main things?” I asked her.
“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.”
Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism. (54)

26. “Do any conversations stick in your mind?”
“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’” (55)

31. Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” (63)

32. /Busy, busy, busy,/ is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery is life really is. (66)

33. He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.” (68)

34. “That’s why she married him. She said his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.” (69)

36. 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 not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. (79)

49. He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water. (107)

55. “Never index your own book.”

59. “She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.”

61. Whenever possible, he had taken the cosmic view, had taken into consideration, for instance, such things as the shortness of life and the longness of eternity. (135)

69. “You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.” (151)

76. “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.” (169)

77. [re: Bokononism feet touching] “It works, you know,” he said. “People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world.” (171)

78. “Truth was the enemy of the people, because truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.” (172)

79. “They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”
“So life became a work of art,” I marveled. (175)

79. He sighed, looking up at the evening sky. “Busy, busy, busy.”
“Sir?”
“It’s what we Bokononists say,” he said, “when we feel that a lot of mysterious things are going on.”
“You?” I was amazed. “A Bokononist, too?”
He gazed at me levelly. “You, too. You’ll find out.” (176)

81. When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God–life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”
“Don’t try,” he said. “Just pretend you understand.”
“That’s–that’s very good advice,” I went limp.
Castle quoted another poem:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

86. We all chuckled.
And we all vied, in saving face, to be the greatest student of human nature, the person with the quickest sense of humor. (192)

88. “Maturity, the way I understand it,” he told me, “is knowing what your limitations are.”
He wasn’t far from Bokonon in defining maturity. “Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.” (198)

91. “It is not possible to make a mistake.” (203)

97. “Science is magic that /works/.” (218)

98. “I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.” (219)

99. “God made mud.
Got got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’
‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait…
To find out for certain what my /wampeter/ was…
And who was in my /karass/…
And all the good things our /karass/ did for you.
Amen.

103. “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.” (231)

105. I record that fact for whatever it may be worth. “Write it all down,” Bokonon tells us. He is really telling us, of course, how futile it is to write or read histories. “Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?” he asks ironically. (237)

107. Well, as Bokonon tells us: “God never wrote a good play in his life.” (240)

110. /The Fourteenth Book/ is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
It doesn’t take long to read /The Fourteenth Book./ It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
“Nothing.” (245)

110. “Think a little! Don’t be afraid of straining your brains. They won’t break.”
“He was always telling us to stretch our brains,” said Frank, recalling olden times. (247)

114. “Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.” (256)

117. Anything that still lived would die soon enough of thirst–or hunger–or rage–or apathy.
I turned to /The Books of Bokonon, still sufficiently unfamiliar with them to believe that they contained spiritual comfort somewhere. I passed quickly over the warning on the title page of /The First Book/:
“Don’t be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but /foma/!”
/Foma/, of course, are lies.
And then I read this:
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. (265)

119. The “Calypso” was this:
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. (270)

120. “You /tell/ me, you /tell/ me who told these ants how to make water,” he challenged me again.
Several times I had offered the obvious notion that God had taught them. And I knew from onerous experience that he would neither reject nor accept this theory. He simply got madder and madder, putting the question again and again.
I walked away from Frank, just as /The Books of Bokonon/ advised me to do. “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.” (281)

125. I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the hearbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.
Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks,
For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks! (284)