A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.
Isn’t a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?
Consciousness of unconsciousness.
It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it’s unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they’ll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist.
Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.
We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.
The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.
That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.
If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho... even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.
You can’t go from people to nonpeople.
Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.
Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.
It’s amazing the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage.
Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.
It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned “talk-tapes” in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegan’s Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.
This guy – Joe whatever – hasn’t even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.
Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed.
You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.
Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not percieve.