Well I just finished reading Cat's Cradle

And I cannot for the life of me gauge what it was about. What the heck was even Cat's Cradle?

I've grabbed a few quotes from the novel that stood out to me for their comedic and satirical efforts at engaging the reader -- really, it was deadpan humor at its finest -- and for their introspective take on truth:

" '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.' "
--Dr. Breed (the scientist, not the brother)

• True, in a sense. Richer in knowledge, richer in foundation, richer in monetary measures. 

" 'There are several ways,' " Dr. Breed said to me, " 'in which certain liquids can crystallize--can freeze--several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way.' "

--Narrator

• Chemistry!!! 

"This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?"

"Yes," I said. "Did you know him?"

"Intimately," he said. "You know what I said when he died?"

"No."

"I said, 'Dr. Hoenikker--he ain't dead.'"

"Oh?"

"Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!"

• Time and death are fruitless concepts, for when someone dies in the realm of Bokonism, they are merely transplanted into another dimension. 

"Mother, Mother, how I pray

For you to guard us every day.

--Angela Hoenikker"

"You are not dead,

But only sleeping.

We should smile,

And stop our weeping.

--Franklin Hoenikker "

"They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons."

• Tragic (SPOILER) lovebirds 

"It straddled a waterfall; had a terrace cantilevered out into the mist rising from the fall. It was a cunning lattice of very light steel posts and beams. The interstices of the lattice were variously open, chinked with native stone, glazed, or curtained by sheets of canvas."

"Stanley led me to my room; led me around the heart of the house, down a staircase of living stone, a staircase sheltered or exposed by steel-framed rectangles at random. My bed was a foam-rubber slab on a stone shelf, a shelf of living stone. The walls of my chamber were canvas. Stanley demonstrated how I might roll them up or down, as I pleased."

• Descriptive passage for the home that the narrator is staying at while visiting the island. Good GOD this sounds like a description of a contemporary/modern home of today -- pristine, crisp, architecturally structured for aesthetic appeal to marvel at with wonder and sparkly eyes 

"She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter's son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession."

• Music so acoustically resonant, it seems to draw from an otherworldly and insane source 

"And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. 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.' "

• Thanks for cataclysmically shattering my hope for mankind there