How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.
It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.
So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.
Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood.
In a society of criminals, the innocent man goes to jail.
I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
I’m tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it’s dark and no one speaks. Forever.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.
There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
For each person there is a sentence – a series of words – which has the power to destroy them.
A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.
The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.
Sometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom.
How much of what we call ‘reality’ is actually out there or rather within our own head?