Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don’t need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.
I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.
Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.
The whole country’s going to puke blood when they read it.
I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else’s body in the photograph that’s introduced as evidence. I didn’t believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.
He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.
We’re a silver gleaming death machine!
This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.
It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.
She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.
The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.
Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?
He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.
How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
Everything was on television last night.
The nice thing about life is that it’s filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
We still want what we want. We want a haircut.
Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we cam, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.
That’s what it all comes down to in the end,′ he said. ‘A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?
The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.