“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

“Maturity...is knowing what your limitations are...Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

“Maturity, Bokonon tells us, is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists”

“I hear he liked flowers pretty well.""Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."--"Out, Brief Candle”

“I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination.”

“Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”

“Only my complacent Mona crossed the crack with a simple step . . .She wasn’t depressed or angry. In fact, she seemed to verge on laughter. ‘He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”