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The Inanity Of Her Remark Infuriated Him. 'good Grief Don't You Understand Janet? At This Point I'm Thoroughly Delusional. I'm As Mentally Ill As It's Possible To Be. It's Incredible That I Can Communicate With You At All. It's A Credit To My Ego-strength That I'm Not At This Point Totally Autistic.

-Philip K. Dick

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The Inanity Of Her

Philip K. Dick

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The Inanity Of Her Remark Infuriated Him. 'good Grief Don't You Understand Janet? At This Point I'm Thoroughly Delusional. I'm As Mentally Ill As It's Possible To Be. It's Incredible That I Can Communicate With You At All. It's A Credit To My Ego-strength That I'm Not At This Point Totally Autistic.

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This, To Me, Is The Ultimately Heroic Trait Of Ordinary People; They Say No To The Tyrant And They Calmly Take The Consequences Of This Resistance.

I Mean, Knowing People, People Are Terrified Of The Unknown And They Want To Just Kill The Unknown.

The Empire Is The Institution, The Codification, Of Derangement; It Is Insane And Imposes Its Insanity On Us By Violence, Since Its Nature Is A Violent One.

Where There's Dope, There's Hope!

Just Because Something Bears The Aspect Of The Inevitable One Should Not, Therefore, Go Along Willingly With It.

Once A Guy Stood All Day Shaking Bugs From His Hair.

Truth, She Thought. As Terrible As Death. But Harder To Find.

Whom The Gods Notice They Destroy.

No Structure, Even An Artificial One, Enjoys The Process Of Entropy. It Is The Ultimate Fate Of Everything, And Everything Resists It.

So We And Our Elaborately Evolving Computers May Meet Each Other Halfway. Someday A Human Being, Named Perhaps Fred White, May Shoot A Robot Named Pete Something-or-other, Which Has Come Out Of A General Electric Factory, And To His Surprise See It Weep And Bleed. And The Dying Robot May Shoot Back And, To Its Surprise, See A Wisp Of Gray Smoke Arise From The Electric Pump That It Supposed Was Mr. White's Beating Heart. It Would Be Rather A Great Moment Of Truth For Both Of Them.

All Responsible Writers, To Some Degree, Have Become Involuntary Criers Of Doom, Because Doom Is In The Wind

No Man Is Infinitely Strong; For Every Creature That Runs, Flies, Hops Or Crawls There Is A Terminal Nemesis Which He Will Not Circumvent, Which Will Finally Do Him In.

Writing Is A Lonely Way Of Life. You Shut Yourself Up In Your Study And Work And Work.

We Should Take Mothers In High Seas And Drown Them There, They Are As Poisonous As Lead In The Air.

Perhaps If You Know You Are Insane Then You Are Not Insane. Or You Are Becoming Sane, Finally.

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.

In This Dark World Where He Now Dwelt, Ugly Things And Surprising Things And Once In A Long While A Tiny Wondrous Thing Spilled Out At Him Constantly; He Could Count On Nothing.

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.

Any Given Man Sees Only A Tiny Portion Of The Total Truth, And Very Often, In Fact Almost ... Perpetually, He Deliberately Deceives Himself About That Little Precious Fragment As Well.

"do You Have Information That There's An Android In The Cast? I'd Be Glad To Help You, And If I Were An Android Would I Be Glad To Help You?" "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."

Sometimes One Must Try Anything, It Is No Disgrace. On The Contrary, It Is A Sign Of Wisdom.

I Want To Write About People I Love, And Put Them Into A Fictional World Spun Out Of My Own Mind, Not The World We Actually Have, Because The World We Actually Have Does Not Meet My Standards.

In One Of The Most Brilliant Papers In The English Language Hume Made It Clear That What We Speak Of As 'causality' Is Nothing More Than The Phenomenon Of Repetition. When We Mix Sulphur With Saltpeter And Charcoal We Always Get Gunpowder. This Is True Of Every Event Subsumed By A Causal Law In Other Words, Everything Which Can Be Called Scientific Knowledge. "it Is Custom Which Rules ," Hume Said, And In That One Sentence Undermined Both Science And Philosophy .

God Can Be Good And Terrible-not In Succession-but At The Same Time. This Is Why We Seek A Mediator Between Us And Him; We Approach Him Through The Mediating Priest And Attenuate And Enclose Him Through The Sacraments. It Is For Our Own Safety: To Trap Him Within Confines Which Render Him Safe.

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.

The Most Dangerous Kind Of Person... Is One Who Is Afraid Of His Own Shadow.

There Was A Beauty In The Trash Of The Alleys Which I Had Never Noticed Before; My Vision Seemed Sharpened, Rather Than Impaired. As I Walked Along It Seemed To Me That The Flattened Beer Cans And Papers And Weeds And Junk Mail Had Been Arranged By The Wind Into Patterns; These Patterns, When I Scrutinized Them, Lay Distributed So As To Comprise A Visual Language.

We Do Not Have An Ideal World, Such As We Would Like, Where Morality Is Easy Because Cognition Is Easy. Where One Can Do Right With No Effort Because He Can Detect The Obvious.

When I Believe, I Am Crazy. When I Don’t Believe, I Suffer Psychotic Depression.

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. At Some Time, Every Creature Which Lives Must Do So. It Is The Ultimate Shadow, The Defeat Of Creation; This Is The Curse At Work, The Curse That Feeds On All Life. Everywhere In The Universe.

The Hell With The Newspapers. Nobody Reads The Letters To The Editor Column Except The Nuts. It's Enough To Get You Down.

Grief Causes You To Leave Yourself. You Step Outside Your Narrow Little Pelt. And You Can’t Feel Grief Unless You’ve Had Love Before It - Grief Is The Final Outcome Of Love, Because It’s Love Lost. […] It’s The Cycle Of Love Completed: To Love, To Lose, To Feel Grief, To Leave, And Then To Love Again. Grief Is The Awareness That You Will Have To Be Alone, And There Is Nothing Beyond That Because Being Alone Is The Ultimate Final Destiny Of Each Individual Living Creature. That’s What Death Is, The Great Loneliness.

Giving Me A A New Idea Is Like Handing A Cretin A Gun, But I Do Thank You Anyhow, Bang Bang.

It Really Seems To Me That In The Midst Of Great Tragedy, There Is Always The Horrible Possibility That Something Terribly Funny Will Happen.

In Washington And Moscow They Are Saying, 'man Has Finally Come Of Age; He Doesn't Need Paternalistic Help.' Which Is Another Way Of Saying, 'we Have Abolished That Help, And In Its Place We Will Rule,' Offering No Help At All: Taking But Not Giving, Ruling But Not Obeying, Telling But Not Listening, Taking Life And Not Giving It. The Slayers Govern Now, Without Interference; The Dreams Of Mankind Have Become Empty.

Everything Is True Everything Anybody Has Ever Thought

Are We To Assist It In Gaining Power In Order To Save Our Lives? Is That The Paradox Of Our Earthly Situation?

Don't Never Participate In No Bad Scenes, He Reminded Himself; That Was His Motto In Life.

Even If All Life On Our Planet Is Destroyed, There Must Be Other Life Somewhere Which We Know Nothing Of. It Is Impossible That Ours Is The Only World; There Must Be World After World Unseen By Us, In Some Region Or Dimension That We Simply Do Not Perceive. Even Though I Can't Prove That, Even Though It Isn't Logical - I Believe It.

I Think That, Like In My Writing, Reality Is Always A Soap Bubble, Silly Putty Thing Anyway. In The Universe People Are In, People Put Their Hands Through The Walls, And It Turns Out They're Living In Another Century Entirely. I Often Have The Feeling — And It Does Show Up In My Books — That This Is All Just A Stage.

But As He Plodded Along A Vague And Almost Hallucinatory Pall Hazed Over His Mind; He Found Himself At One Point, With No Notion Of How It Could Be, A Step From An Almost Certain Fatal Cliffside Fall—falling Humiliatingly And Helplessly, He Thought; On And On, With No One Even To Witness It. Here There Existed No One To Record His Or Anyone Else's Degradation, And Any Courage Or Pride Which Might Manifest Itself Here At The End Would Go Unmarked: The Dead Stones, The Dust-stricken Weeds Dry And Dying, Perceived Nothing, Recollected Nothing, About Him Or Themselves.

How Much Of What We Call 'reality' Is Actually Out There Or Rather Within Our Own Head?

Little Kids Are That Way; They Feel If Their Parents Aren't Watching What They Do Then What They Do Isn't Real.

You Must Beware Of Seeing Malice Behind Accidental Injury.

The Frogs Hopping Indoors Agree That We Are On A Prison Planet. They Themselves Are Frog Criminals That Were Convicted Of Doing Frog Crimes.

In My Writing I Even Question The Universe; I Wonder Out Loud If It Is Real, And I Wonder Out Loud If All Of Us Are Real.

I Will Never Fully Understand; That Is The Nature Of Such Creatures. Or Is This Inner Truth Now, This That Is Happening To Me? I Will Wait. I Will See. Which It Is. Perhaps It Is Both.

The Real Origin Of Science Fiction Lay In The Seventeeth-century Novels Of Exploration In Fabulous Lands. Therefore Jules Verne's Story Of Travel To The Moon Is Not Science Fiction Because They Go By Rocket But Because Of Where They Go. It Would Be As Much Science Fiction If They Went By Rubber Band.

Madness Has Its Own Dynamism. It Just Goes On.

My Major Preoccupation Is The Question, 'what Is Reality?'

We Are Served By Organic Ghosts, He Thought, Who, Speaking And Writing, Pass Through This Our New Environment. Watching, Wise, Physical Ghosts From The Full-life World, Elements Of Which Have Become For Us Invading But Agreeable Splinters Of A Substance That Pulsates Like A Former Heart.

They Wanted To Have A Good Time, But They Were Like Children Playing In The Street; They Could See One After Another Of Them Being Killed--run Over, Maimed, Destroyed--but They Continued To Play Anyhow.

Unless We Can Psychologically Accommodate Change, We Ourselves Begin To Die, Inwardly. What I Am Saying Is That Objects, Customs, Habits, And Ways Of Life Must Perish So That The Authentic Human Being Can Live. And It Is The Authentic Human Being Who Matters Most, The Viable, Elastic Organism Which Can Bounce Back, Absorb, And Deal With The New.

I Never Felt Like That Before. Maybe It Could Be Depression, Like You Get. I Can Understand How You Suffer Now When You're Depressed; I Always Thought You Liked It And I Thought You Could Have Snapped Yourself Out Any Time, If Not Alone Then My Means Of The Mood Organ. But When You Get That Depressed You Don't Care. Apathy, Because You've Lose A Sense Of Worth. It Doesn't Matter Whether You Feel Better Because You Have No Worth.

Amazed, Fat Said, "she's Decomposing And Yet She's Still Giving Birth?" "only To Monsters," Dr. Stone Said.

I Want To Write About People I Love, And Put Them Into A Fictional World Spun Out Of My Own Mind, Not The World We Actually Have, Because The World We Actually Have Does Not Meet My Standards. Okay, So I Should Revise My Standards; I'm Out Of Step. I Should Yield To Reality. I Have Never Yielded To Reality. That's What Sf Is All About. If You Wish To Yield To Reality, Go Read Philip Roth; Read The New York Literary Establishment Mainstream Bestselling Writers

Should We Have A Leader Or Should We Think For Ourselves? Obviously The Latter In Principle. But-sometimes There Lies A Gulf Between What Is Theoretically Right And That Which Is Practical.

Life In Anaheim, California, Was A Commercial For Itself, Endlessly Replayed. Nothing Changed; It Just Spread Out Farther And Farther In The Form Of Neon Ooze. What There Was Always More Of Had Been Congealed Into Permanence Long Ago, As If The Automatic Factory That Cranked Out These Objects Had Jammed In The On Position.

My Major Preoccupation Is The Question, 'what Is Reality ?' Many Of My Stories And Novels Deal With Psychotic States Or Drug-induced States By Which I Can Present The Concept Of A Multiverse Rather Than A Universe. Music And Sociology Are Themes In My Novels, Also Radical Political Trends; In Particular I've Written About Fascism And My Fear Of It.

The Only Real Failure Is To Fail Others.

In A Nutshell-i Fear Authority But At The Same Time I Resent It-the Authority And My Own Fear. So I Rebel.

How Undisturbed, The Sleep Of The Foolish.

He Felt All At Once Like An Ineffectual Moth, Fluttering At The Windowpane Of Reality, Dimly Seeing It From Outside.

Can We Consider The Universe Real, And If So, In What Way?

The Wisest People Are The Clowns, Like Harpo Marx, Who Would Not Speak. If I Could Have Anything I Want I Would Like God To Listen To What Harpo Was Not Saying, And Understand Why Harpo Would Not Talk.

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 In Judgment. When A Bunch Of People Begin To Do It, It Is A Social Error, A Life-style. In This Particular Life-style The Motto Is "be Happy Now Because Tomorrow You Are Dying," But The Dying Begins Almost At Once, And The Happiness Is A Memory.

(insanity) Is Not Hubris, Not Pride; It Is Inflation Of The Ego To Its Ultimate - Confusion Between Him Who Worships And That Which Is Worshipped. Man Has Not Eaten God; God Has Eaten Man.

I'm Tired And I Want To Rest; I Want To Get Out Of This And Go Lie Down Somewhere, Off Where It's Dark And No One Speaks. Forever.

There Exists, For Everyone, A Sentence - A Series Of Words - That Has The Power To Destroy You. Another Sentence Exists, Another Series Of Words, That Could Heal You. If You're Lucky You Will Get The Second, But You Can Be Certain Of Getting The First.

Sometimes I Wish I Knew How To Go Crazy. I Forget How.

If You Think This Universe Is Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others.

A Lot Can Be Said For The Infinite Mercies Of God, But The Smarts Of A Good Pharmacist, When You Get Down To It, Is Worth More.

It Is Amazing That When Someone Else Spouts The Nonsense You Yourself Believe You Can Readily Perceive It As Nonsense

Believe You Can

The Distinction Between Sanity And Insanity Is Narrower Than A Razor’s Edge, Sharper Than A Hound’s Tooth, More Agile Than A Mule Deer. It Is More Elusive Than The Merest Phantom. Perhaps It Does Not Even Exist; Perhaps It Is A Phantom.

Activity Does Not Necessarily Mean Life.

To Fight The Empire Is To Be Infected By Its Derangement.... Whoever Defeats The Empire Becomes The Empire; It Proliferates Like A Virus.

Why Does A Man Cry? He Wondered. Not Like A Woman; Not For That. Not For Sentiment. A Man Cries Over The Loss Of Something, Something Alive. A Man Can Cry Over A Sick Animal That He Knows Won't Make It. The Death Of A Child: A Man Can Cry For That. But Not Because Things Are Sad. A Man, He Thought, Cries Not For The Future Or The Past But For The Present.

Maybe Each Human Being Lives In A Unique World, A Private World Different From Those Inhabited And Experienced By All Other Humans. . . If Reality Differs From Person To Person, Can We Speak Of Reality Singular, Or Shouldn't We Really Be Talking About Plural Realities? And If There Are Plural Realities, Are Some More True (more Real) Than Others?

God Is Dead,' Nick Said. 'they Found His Carcass In 2019. Floating In Space Near Alpha.' 'they Found The Remains Of An Organism Advanced Several Thousand Times Over What We Are,' Charley Said. 'and Evidently Could Create Habitable Worlds And Populate Them With Living Organisms, Derived From Itself. But That Doesn't Prove It Was God.

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.

Insanity - To Have To Construct A Picture Of One's Life, By Making Inquiries Of Others.

It Is Sometimes An Appropriate Response To Reality To Go Insane.

I Started Reading Sf When I Was About Twelve And I Read All I Could, So Any Author Who Was Writing About That Time, I Read. But There's No Doubt Who Got Me Off Originally And That Was A. E. Van Vogt.

But An Artist, He Realized. Or Rather So-called Artist. Bohemian. That's Closer To It. The Artistic Life Without The Talent.

Fear Can Make You Do More Wrong Than Hate Or Jealousy... Fear Makes You Always, Always Hold Something Back.

Barefoot Conducts His Seminars On His Houseboat In Sausalito. It Costs A Hundred Dollars To Find Out Why We Are On This Earth. You Also Get A Sandwich, But I Wasn't Hungry That Day. John Lennon Had Just Been Killed And I Think I Know Why We Are On This Earth; It's To Find Out That What You Love The Most Will Be Taken Away From You, Probably Due To An Error In High Places Rather Than By Design.

Men And The World Are Mutually Toxic To Each Other.

When He Turned On The Tape-transport Once More, Arctor Was Saying, "-- As Near As I Can Figure Out, God Is Dead." Luckman Answered, "i Didn't Know He Was Sick.

It's Not What Happened But How It Is Told.

The Inanity Of Her Remark Infuriated Him. 'good Grief Don't You Understand Janet? At This Point I'm Thoroughly Delusional. I'm As Mentally Ill As It's Possible To Be. It's Incredible That I Can Communicate With You At All. It's A Credit To My Ego-strength That I'm Not At This Point Totally Autistic.

It Did Not Seem Possible That Wendy Wright Had Been Born Out Of Blood And Internal Organs Like Other People. In Proximity To Her He Felt Himself To Be A Squat, Oily, Sweating, Uneducated Nurt Whose Stomach Rattled And Whose Breath Wheezed. Near Her He Became Aware Of The Physical Mechanisms Which Kept Him Alive; Within Him Machinery, Pipes And Valves And Gas-compressors And Fan Belts Had To Chug Away At A Losing Task, A Labor Ultimately Doomed. Seeing Her Face, He Discovered That His Own Consisted Of A Garish Mask; Noticing Her Body Made Him Feel Like A Low-class Wind-up Toy.

There Is No Route Out Of The Maze. The Maze Shifts As You Move Through It, Because It Is Alive.

We Hypostatize Information Into Objects. Rearrangement Of Objects Is Change In The Content Of The Information; The Message Has Changed. This Is A Language Which We Have Lost The Ability To Read. We Ourselves Are A Part Of This Language; Changes In Us Are Changes In The Content Of The Information. We Ourselves Are Information-rich; Information Enters Us, Is Processed And Is Then Projected Outward Once More, Now In An Altered Form. We Are Not Aware That We Are Doing This, That In Fact This Is All We Are Doing.

When I Was A Child, I Thought As A Child. But Now I Have Put Away Childish Things. ... I Must Be Scientific.

Childish Things

The Silence Of The World Could Not Rein Back It's Greed. Not Any Longer. Not When It Had Virtually Won.

The Unconscious Is Selective, When It Learns What To Listen For.

...the Essence Of The Evil Government Is That It Anticipates Bad Conduct On The Part Of Its Citizens. Any Government Which Assumes That The Population Is Going To Do Something Evil Has Already Lost Its Franchise To Govern.

…we All Lie To Ourselves; We Tell Our Own Selves More Lies Than We Ever Do Other People.

I Guess That's The Story Of Life: What You Most Fear Never Happens, But What You Most Yearn For Never Happens Either. This Is The Difference Between Life And Fiction. I Suppose It's A Good Trade-off. But I'm Not Sure.

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.

Whom The Gods Notice They Destroy. Be Small... And You Will Escape The Jealousy Of The Great.

She Makes Life Over, He Realized. She Controls Life, Whereas I Just Sit On My Can And Let It Happen To Me.

This Is A Mournful Discovery. 1)those Who Agree With You Are Insane 2)those Who Do Not Agree With You Are In Power.

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.

Madness, Like Small Fish, Runs In Hosts, In Vast Numbers Of Instances.

What Constitutes The Authentic Human Being?

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.

I Never Liked The Idea Of Doing What A Machine Says. I Hate Having To Salute Something Built In A Factory.

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'.

Because Today We Live In A Society In Which Spurious Realities Are Manufactured By The Media, By Governments, By Big Corporations, By Religious Groups, Political Groups... So I Ask, In My Writing, What Is Real? Because Unceasingly We Are Bombarded With Pseudo-realities Manufactured By Very Sophisticated People Using Very Sophisticated Electronic Mechanisms. I Do Not Distrust Their Motives; I Distrust Their Power. They Have A Lot Of It. And It Is An Astonishing Power: That Of Creating Whole Universes, Universes Of The Mind. I Ought To Know. I Do The Same Thing.

Matter Is Plastic In The Face Of Mind.

Fish Cannot Carry Guns.

I Mean, After All, You Have To Consider We're Only Made Out Of Dust. That's Admittedly Not Much To Go On And We Shouldn't Forget That. But Even Considering, I Mean It's Sort Of A Bad Beginning, We're Not Doing Too Bad. So I Personally Have Faith That Even In This Lousy Situation We're Faced With We Can Make It. You Get Me?

Life Is Short, He Thought. Art, Or Something Not Life, Is Long, Stretching Out Endless, Like [a] Concrete Worm. Flat, White, Unsmoothed By Any Passage Over Or Across It.

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.

He Started Keeping A Journal - Had Been, In Fact, Secretly Doing So For Some Time: The Furtive Act Of A Deranged Person.

I, For One, Bet On Science As Helping Us. I Have Yet To See How It Fundamentally Endangers Us, Even With The H-bomb Lurking About. Science Has Given Us More Lives Than It Has Taken; We Must Remember That.

Life ... Is Only Heavy And None Else; There Is Only The One Trip, All Heavy. Heavy That Leads To The Grave. For Everyone And Everything.

The Logos Was Both That Which Thought, And The Thing Which It Thought: Thinker And Thought Together. The Universe, Then, Is Thinker And Thought, And Since We Are Part Of It, We As Humans Are, In The Final Analysis, Thoughts Of And Thinkers Of Those Thoughts.

I Was Twelve When I Read My First Sf Magazine

I Think Great Art Should Play A Part In The Ordinary Man's Life, Don't You? It Can Make His Existence So Much Richer And More Meaningful.

Any System Which Says, This Is A Rotten World, Wait For The Next, Give Up, Do Nothing, Succumb--that May Be The Basic Lie And If We Participate In Believing It And Acting (or Rather Not Acting) On It We Involve Ourselves In The Lie And Suffer Dreadfully... Which Only Reinforces That Particular Lie.

I'm Not Much But I'm All I Have.

Why Is Love So Good...? You Love Someone And They Leave. They Come Home One Day And You Say "what's Happening?" And They Say, "i Got A Better Offer Someplace Else," And There They Go, Out Of Your Life Forever, And After That Until You're Dead You're Carrying Around This Huge Hunk Of Love With No One To Give It To. And If You Do Find Someone To Give It To, The Same Thing Happens All Over.

That Is The Artist's Job: Take Mineral Rock From Dark Silent Earth, Transform It Into Shining Light-reflecting Form From Sky.

The Tragedy In His Life Already Existed. To Love An Atmospheric Spirit. That Was The Real Sorrow. Hopelessness Itself. Nowhere On The Printed Page, Nowhere In The Annals Of Man, Would Her Name Appear: No Local Habitation, No Name. There Are Girls Like That, He Thought, And Those You Love Most, The Ones Where There Is No Hope Because It Has Eluded You At The Very Moment You Close Your Hands Around It.

The Pre-socratic Greek Philosopher Parmenides Taught That The Only Things That Are Real Are Things Which Never Change... And The Pre-socratic Greek Philosopher Heraclitus Taught That Everything Changes. If You Superimpose Their Two Views, You Get This Result: Nothing Is Real.

Empathy, He Once Had Decided, Must Be Limited To Herbivores Or Anyhow Omnivores Who Could Depart From A Meat Diet. Because,ultimately, The Empathic Gift Blurred The Boundaries Between Hunter And Victim, Between The Successful And The Defeated.

For Each Person There Is A Sentence—a Series Of Words—which Has The Power To Destroy Them.

What Is Possible And What Is Not Possible Is Not Objectively Known But Is, Rather, A Subjective Belief On The Part Of The Author And Of The Reader.

People Have Told Me That Everything About Me, Every Facet Of My Life, Psyche, Experiences, Dreams, And Fears, Are Laid Out Explicitly In My Writing, That From The Corpus Of My Work I Can Be Absolutely And Precisely Inferred. This Is True.

Each Of Us Assumes Everyone Else Knows What He Is Doing. They All Assume We Know What We Are Doing. We Don't.

I Am A Reader. I Am A Writer. People Assume I Do These Things To Escape. You Couldn't Be More Right. I'm Escaping A World I Don't Like. A World I Have No Control In. In This World, I Am Nothing. I Am A Color, A Height, A Weight, A Number. But In The World Of Books And Writing, I Am Amazing. I Am Powerful. I Am Different. People Are Better. Worlds Are Endless. Change Is Possible. Life Is Manageable.

When You Are Crazy You Learn To Keep Quiet.

One Thing I've Found That I Can Do That I Really Enjoy Is Rereading My Own Writing, Earlier Stories And Novels Especially. It Induces Mental Time Travel, The Same Way Certain Songs You Hear On The Radio Do ... The Whole Thing Returns, An Eerie Feeling That I'm Sure You've Experienced.

The Bird Is Gone, And In What Meadow Does It Now Sing?

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.

Maybe I'll Go Where I Can See Stars, He Said To Himself As The Car Gained Velocity And Altitude; It Headed Away From San Francisco, Toward The Uninhabited Desolation To The North. To The Place Where No Living Thing Would Go. Not Unless It Felt That The End Had Come.

I'm A Strange Person. Sometimes I Hardly Know What I'm Going To Do Or Say Next. Sometimes I Seem A Stranger To Myself. Sometimes What I Do Surprises Me And I Can't Understand Why I Do It.

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.

My Schedule For Today Lists A Six-hour Self-accusatory Depression.

What They Do Not Comprehend Is Man's Helplessness. I Am Weak, Small, Of No Consequence To The Universe. It Does Not Notice Me; I Live On Unseen. But Why Is That Bad? Isn't It That Way? Whom The Gods Notice They Destroy. Be Small... And You Will Escape The Jealousy Of The Great.

The Problem With Introspection Is That It Has No End.

It's Easy To Win. Anybody Can Win.

A Human Being Without The Proper Empathy Or Feeling Is The Same As An Android Built So As To Lack It, Either By Design Or Mistake. We Mean, Basically, Someone Who Does Not Care About The Fate Which His Fellow Living Creatures Fall Victim To; He Stands Detached, A Spectator, Acting Out By His Indifference John Donne's Theorem That "no Man Is An Island," But Giving That Theorem A Twist: That Which Is A Mental And A Moral Island Is Not A Man.

What A Tragic Realm This Is, He Reflected. Those Down Here Are Prisoners, And The Ultimate Tragedy Is That They Don't Know It; They Think They Are Free Because They Have Never Been Free, And Do Not Understand What It Means.

So Books Are Real To Me, Too; They Link Me Not Just With Other Minds But With The Vision Of Other Minds, What Those Minds Understand And See. I See Their Worlds As Well As I See My Own.

The Painting Showed A Hairless, Oppressed Creature With A Head Like An Inverted Pear, Its Hands Clapped In Horror To Its Ears, Its Mouth Open In A Vast, Soundless Scream. Twisted Ripples Of The Creature's Torment, Echoes Of Its Cry, Flooded Out Into The Air Surrounding It; The Man Or Woman, Whichever It Was, Had Become Contained By Its Own Howl. It Had Covered Its Ears Against Its Own Sound. The Creature Stood On A Bridge And No One Else Was Present; The Creature Screamed In Isolation. Cut Off By - Or Despite - Its Outcry.

On Some Other World, Possibly It Is Different. Better. There Are Clear Good And Evil Alternatives. Not These Obscure Admixtures, These Blends, With No Proper Tool By Which To Untangle The Components.

And Of Course, In My Writing, There Is The Constant Theme Of Music, Love Of, Preoccupation With, Music. Music Is The Single Thread Making My Life Into A Coherency.

Skill Is A Function Of Chance. It’s An Intuitive Best-use Of Chance Situations.

We Have Entered A Moment When We Are Alone. We Cannot Get Assistance, As Before. Well, Mr. Tagomi Thought, Perhaps That Too Is Good. Or Can Be Made Good. One Must Still Try To Find The Way.

Science Fiction Writers, I Am Sorry To Say, Really Do Not Know Anything.

No Matter How Long A Log Stays In The Water, It Doesn't Become A Crocodile.

He Entered The Elevator And Together They Moved Closer To God

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.

In A One-party System There Is Always A Landslide.

Every Time I See A Picture Of Stalin I Look Him Square In The Eye And I Say: You're A Meat Eater, Joseph.

To Live Is To Be Haunted.

Can Anyone Alter Fate? All Of Us Combined... Or One Great Figure... Or Someone Strategically Placed, Who Happens To Be In The Right Spot. Chance. Accident. And Our Lives, Our World, Hanging On It.

In A Sense, The Better You Adapt To School The Less Your Chances Are Of Later Adapting To The Actual World. So I Figure, The Worse You Adapt To School, The Better You Will Be Able To Handle Reality When You Finally Manage To Get Loose At Last From School, If That Ever Happens. But I Guess I Have What In The Military They Call A 'poor Attitude,' Which Means 'shape Up Or Ship Out.' I Always Elected To Ship Out.

Imagine Being Sentient But Not Alive. Seeing And Even Knowing, But Not Alive. Just Looking Out. Recognizing But Not Being Alive. A Person Can Die And Still Go On. Sometimes What Looks Out At You From A Person's Eyes Maybe Died Back In Childhood.

When Two People Dream The Same Dream, It Ceases To Be An Illusion.

Strange How Paranoia Can Link Up With Reality Now And Then.

The Pain, So Unexpected And Undeserved, Had For Some Reason Cleared Away The Cobwebs. I Realized I Didn’t Hate The Cabinet Door, I Hated My Life… My House, My Family, My Backyard, My Power Mower. Nothing Would Ever Change; Nothing New Could Ever Be Expected. It Had To End, And It Did. Now In The Dark World Where I Dwell, Ugly Things, And Surprising Things, And Sometimes Little Wondrous Things, Spill Out In Me Constantly, And I Can Count On Nothing.

Don't Try To Solve Serious Matters In The Middle Of The Night.

You Know How People Are About Not Taking Care Of An Animal; They Consider It Immoral And Antiempathic. I Mean, Technically It's Not A Crime Like It Was Right After Wwt But The Feeling's Still There.

The Odd Thing In This World Is That An Eager-beaver Type, With No Original Ideas, Who Mimes Those In Authority Above Him Right To The Last Twist Of Necktie And Scrape Of Chin, Always Gets Noticed. Gets Selected. Rises.

Those Who Refused To Respond To The New Stimulus Would Perish. Adapt Or Perish.

The Person I Am Now, Compared With The Person In The Dream, Has Been Baffled And Defeated And Only Supposes He Enjoys A Full Life. In The Dreams, I See What A Full Life Really Consists Of, And It Is Not What I Really Have.

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.

Everything In Life Is Just For A While.

Activity Does Not Necessarily Mean Life. Quasars Are Active. And A Monk Meditating Is Not Inanimate.

What Scared Me The Most Was When My Father Would Put On The Gasmask. His Face Would Disappear... This Was Not A Human Being At All.

Upon Him The Contempt Of Three Planets Descended.

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.

He Sat Watching The People Go By, Wondering How A Thing Of This Sort Could Have Come About, I Must Have Let Myself Get Mixed Up In Something Horrible, He Thought ... Probably She's The One Who Did It; I Have No Control Of Myself Or Anything That's Happened. So Now I'm Waking Up. I'm Awake, He Thought ... I've Been Destroyed And Now That I'm Awake All I Can Do Is Realize It ... The Shock Of Getting Up There And Telling That Account Made Me See. Mixture Of Lies And Bits Of Truth. Woven Together. Unable To See Where Each Starts.

You Have To Be With Other People, He Thought. In Order To Live At All. I Mean Before They Came Here I Could Stand It... But Now It Has Changed. You Can't Go Back, He Thought. You Can't Go From People To Nonpeople." - J.r. Isidore

In A Civil War… Every Side Is Wrong. It’s Hopeless To Try To Untangle It. Everyone Is A Victim.

A Child Of Today Can Detect A Lie Quicker Than The Wisest Adult Of Two Decades Ago. When I Want To Know What Is True, I Ask My Children.

Either I've Invented A Whole New Logic Or, Ahem, I'm Not Playing With A Full Deck.

I Have Seen Myself Backward.

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 Day Came. The Wrath Descended. Sin, Guilt, And Retribution? The Manic Psychoses Of Those Entities We Referred To As States, Institutions, Systems - The Powers, The Thrones, The Dominations - The Things Which Perpetually Merge With Men And Emerge From Them? Our Darkness, Externalized And Visible? However You Look Upon These Matters, The Critical Point Was Reached. The Wrath Descended.

I Am Ubik. Before The Universe Was, I Am. I Made The Suns. I Made The Worlds. I Created The Lives And The Places They Inhabit; I Move Them Here, I Put Them There. They Go As I Say, Then Do As I Tell Them. I Am The Word And My Name Is Never Spoken, The Name Which No One Knows. I Am Called Ubik, But That Is Not My Name. I Am. I Shall Always Be.

But The Actual Touch Of Her Lingered, Inside His Heart. That Remained. In All The Years Of His Life Ahead, The Long Years Without Her, With Never Seeing Her Or Hearing From Her Or Knowing Anything About Her, If She Was Alive Or Happy Or Dead Or What, That Touch Stayed Locked Within Him, Sealed In Himself, And Never Went Away. That One Touch Of Her Hand.

There Are No Private Lives. This A Most Important Aspect Of Modern Life. That One Of The Biggest Transformations We Have Seen In Human Life In Our Society Is The Diminution Of The Sphere Of The Private. That We Must Reasonably Now All Regard The Fact That There Are No Secrets And Nothing Is Private. Everything Is Public.

The Church Of My Choice Is The Free, Open World.

Odd That The Brain Could Function On Its Own, Without Acquainting Him With Its Purposes, Its Reasons. But The Brain Was An Organ, Like The Spleen, Heart, Kidneys. And They Went About Their Private Activities. So Why Not The Brain?

Many Men Talk Like Philosophers And Live Like Fools.

I Like Her; I Could Watch Her The Rest Of My Life. She Has Breasts That Smile.

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.

Fat Realized That One Of Two Possibilities Existed And Only Two; Either Dr. Stone Was Totally Insane – Not Just Insane But Totally So – Or Else In An Artful, Professional Fashion He Had Gotten Fat To Talk; He Had Drawn Fat Out And Now Knew That Fat Was Totally Insane.

If I'd Known It Was Harmless, I'd Have Killed It Myself!

Emigrate Or Degenerate.

I Must Admit That The Existence Of Disneyland (which I Know Is Real) Proves That We Are Not Living In Judaea In 50 Ad. . . . Saint Paul Would Never Go Near Disneyland. Only Children, Tourists, And Visiting Soviet High Officials Ever Go To Disneyland. Saints Do Not.

Each Of Us Assumes Everyone Else Knows What He Is Doing. They All Assume We Know What We Are Doing. We Don't...nothing Is Going On And Nobody Knows What It Is. Nobody Is Concealing Anything Except The Fact That He Does Not Understand Anything Anymore And Wishes He Could Go Home.

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.

The True Measure Of A Man Is Not His Intelligence Or How High He Rises In This Freak Establishment. No, The True Measure Of A Man Is This: How Quickly Can He Respond To The Needs Of Others And How Much Of Himself He Can Give.

The Cries Of The Dead Are Terrible Indeed; You Should Try Not To Hear Them.

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