Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Van Vechten

An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five-year-old: it lands like a compliment to curiosity, then twists into a sly downgrade of our romantic story about childhood wonder. Van Vechten, a writer who made a career out of observing scenes and signaling what polite culture preferred to ignore, picks the least threatening creature imaginable and turns it into a benchmark that embarrasses us.

The joke works because “ask” is doing double duty. Kittens don’t interrogate in sentences; they investigate with paws, teeth, and reckless body language. Their questions are physical: What happens if I push this? Will you chase me? Does it move if I bite it? Against that, the five-year-old starts to look oddly domesticated, already learning which questions get laughs, which get scolded, which derail the schedule. The line isn’t anti-child so much as anti-sentimentality: it punctures the adult habit of treating kids as pure engines of inquiry while we’re busy training them to be manageable.

There’s also a modernist edge: curiosity isn’t a moral trait here, it’s a temperament, closer to appetite than virtue. “Ordinary” is key. Van Vechten isn’t praising a special kitten; he’s suggesting that relentless experimentation is the default setting of life before it’s socialized out of you.

In a culture that loves to mythologize innocence, the kitten becomes a small, comic truth-teller: real curiosity is messy, incessant, and inconvenient. The subtext is a dare to adults, too: if you want more questions in the world, stop rewarding only the ones that arrive politely phrased.