The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.
I feel the hot winds of karma driving me.
I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.
Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.
Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.
Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.
But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting – do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ’absence of appropriate affect.
Dio promette la vita eterna” disse Eldritch. “Io posso fare di meglio; posso metterla in commercio.
Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we’re whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We’re at the mercy of some kind of whim.
In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately – and against ordinary experience – vanished. The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.
They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed – all he’s got to do is thump on the drum, and there’s his response. And he’s laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.
Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don’t know.
If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.
Watching him, Juliana thought, It’s idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.
We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia.
No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.
Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.