If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
This is a mournful discovery.1)Those who agree with you are insane2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.
Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.
Everything is true,’ he said. ‘Everything anybody has ever thought.”Will you be all right?”I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.
We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.
The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back.
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.
It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
A law of survival, Ragle had said. Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish . . . version of a timeless rule.
I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.
Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy… fear makes you always, always hold something back.
It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.
And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.
But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.
And,” my dad concluded, calming down a little, “all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man’s little and can’t fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him.
The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?
Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I’m the one that’s alive. You’re all dead.
Insane people — psychologically defined, not legally define — are not in touch with reality.
What about — not sex — but love?”Love is another name for sex.”Like love of country,’ Rick said. ‘Love of music.
That’s what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever’s in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it…
A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?” Fat said. “There are worse diseases than cancer.””Did he show you slides?”We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It’s a big business, I am told.
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist.
We didn’t have sense enough to take care of it. Now it’s torn. And the artist is dead.
There is evil! It’s actual, like cement.I can’t believe it. I can’t stand it.Evil is not a view … it’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.
It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.
You mean old books?””Stories written before space travel but about space travel.””How could there have been stories about space travel before –“”The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.
Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.
When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.
Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness.
…hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create – and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness
Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step.
That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.
If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.
How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just – change.With nothing causing it.
A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.
There are people among us who are biologically human but who are androids in the metaphoric sense.
Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.
The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they’d meditated on how to ball her, and remained.
Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this
The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.
There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.
I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.(Mercer)
Cancer… the process of creation gone wild, I thought.
Amazed, Fat said, “She’s decomposing and yet she’s still giving birth?””Only to monsters,” Dr. Stone said.
We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us.
Guilt — if there was any guilt — spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.
Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.
Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.
The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I’d like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me.
I should not yield to it, he told himself once again as he walked along carrying the briefcase. Compulsion-obsession-phobia. But he could not free himself. It in my grip, I in its, he thought.
You’re an unusual person,” she said.”Bill didn’t like you, but he never likes anything different. He’s so—so prosaic. Don’t you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened in his outlook?
An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for.”“Then,” Miss Luft said, “you must be an android.
I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.
If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.
I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, “You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.
#36:…Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?
When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back.
Just tell me why; why the fucking why?” To which the universe would hollowly respond, “My ways cannot be known, oh man.” Which is to say, “My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
Please don’t continually say I’m paranoid.Why?It makes me paranoid.
Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.
Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.
It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?
It’s easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.
No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.
Her smile increased. She had perfect white regular teeth; Irish, Juliana decided. Only Irish blood could give that jawline such femininity.
She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.
You know what I think? I think you’ve picked up the Nazi idea that Jews can’t create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen.’ He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink.’Maybe so,’ Frink said.
I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.