If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we’ve done in our lifetime – we’d drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren’t made to understand what they do.
Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I’m the one that’s alive. You’re all dead.
This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And.
Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this.
You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?” Zina hesitated. “It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology;.
I believe he’s got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we’d be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we’d be one country and we’d have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.
Nothing is true.
Those who take lives will lose their own. Those who kill, will die. But he who gives his own life away will live again!
Blood, Herr Reiss, can never be eradicated like ink.
Good by,’ he said and hung up. What kind of world is it, he asked himself, when an android phones up a bounty hunter and offers him assistance?
Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself finally.
The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men.
They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life;.
Of course, he snuck all this in under the guise of pulp science fiction, baiting us into believing that maybe this is all just fantasy. Only once the story is over, and we take another look at the world around us, do we realize: It’s all completely true.
Dreadful low-class jingoistic racist invectives, unworthy of me.
You stupid bastard, does what you’re fighting for look so real now? Skin pigment. What a laugh! Why not eye color? Too bad nobody ever thought of that. It cuts it a little finer, but basically it’s the same thing.
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. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking;.
You got me out of this place and here’s your reward; you’re everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we’re committed to destroy.
We trust – I’ll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it’s our goddamn superior intelligence!
The hands of the artificer,” Paul said, “had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves.