Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?
She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.
Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You’re a meat eater, Joseph.
Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.
If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.
What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don’t know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.
Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn’t matter.
Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.
Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
He started keeping a journal – had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.
Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.
Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.
They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed, destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow.
The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet. They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes.
Amazed, Fat said, “She’s decomposing and yet she’s still giving birth?” “Only to monsters,” Dr. Stone said.