My father told me what it used to feel like, waiting in the dentist’s office. Every time the nurse opened the door you thought, It’s happening. The thing I’ve been afraid of all my life.
Stuart said, “I hid once in the sidewalk. Do I have to do that again?” He looked around at the rest of them, seeking an answer. “Yes,” Bonny said. “Then I will,” he said. “But I came up out of the sidewalk; I didn’t stay there. And I’ll come up again.
It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don’t know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.
I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.
Back to Germany,” one of the cops said, surveying him. “I’m an American,” Frank Frink said. “You’re a Jew,” the cop said.
Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.
Insane people – psychologically defined, not legally define – are not in touch with reality.
He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural. And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.
God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever.
Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?
I hope I never get in a fix like that,” Taubman said. “Hating someone I once loved.
The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level – call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material.
After her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. “Some other time,” the girl said, and moved back toward her apartment door.
That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.
Dr Stone wasn’t insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.
A man driven by rage may stumble, in his passion, onto truth.
Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you’re positive he can’t rise up behind you. If you’re going to burn him, make sure he’s dead. Because if he’s alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.
When has the government ever told anyone the truth?
Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I’d like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn’t sin and fall but was pushed – which is bad enough – but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.
Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.