Fear 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. You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.
We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can’t get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.
No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn’t become a crocodile.
Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
To live is to be haunted.
Emigrate or Degenerate.
Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don’t.
Insanity – to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.
Don’t never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.
It’s easy to win. Anybody can win.
Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.
In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.
All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind.
The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk.
The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.
It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.
When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion.
A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.