He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre.
It’s a fact. I can’t get faith or enthusiasm by willing it. Deciding to.
It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.
It sounds like they’re saying passive life is good, he thought. But there is no such thing as passive life. That’s a contradiction.
What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.
Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.
If you dial’, Iran said, eyes open and watching, ‘for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me!’ She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called – stigmata.
Kill the Spartan runners,” I said. Furiously, Kirsten lashed at me, “Is that one of your Berkeley educated remarks?
Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.
The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time... the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real.
She scrutinized him with a mixture of pleasure and pity; or so he read her expression.
You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.
We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.
It strikes me as an interesting paradox that a Buddha-an enlightened one-would be unable to figure it out, even after four-and-a-half years, that he had become enlightened. Fat had become totally bogged down in his enormous exegesis, trying futilely to determine what had happened to him. He resembled more a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.
El tiempo, ay, daba prisa a los hombres.
Mercerism is a swindle.′ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.
Fat, pondering and writing and doing research and receiving dribs and drabs of messages from Zebra during hypnagogic states and in dreams, and attempting to salvage something from the wreck of his life, had decided to go in search of the Savior. He would find him wherever he was.
I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.
I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create.