Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society.
I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it’ll happen someday to me like it did him.
Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.
Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future.
Still enough of us once more to build and hope and make a few simple plans.
Possibly his experience with the bounty hunter Phil Resch had altered some minute synapsis in him, had closed one neurological switch and opened another. And this perhaps had started a chain reaction.
I am by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California.
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another.
In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.
You’re a function of an impersonal cultural totality. You have no standards of your own. In the twentieth century men had personal standards of workmanship, artistic craft, pride of accomplishment, these words mean nothing to you. You have no soul.
There wasn’t a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else.
The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with?
Talk all you want,” Rick said. Talk all the way to the tomb, he said to himself. If you feel like it. It didn’t matter to him.
I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I – I personally – really exist; I’m just representative of a type.
Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer works.
Sidney’s never makes a mistake, he said to himself. We know that, too. What else can we depend on?
I’ll be all right,” he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.
What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it’s time to go home. Maybe after I’ve been there awhile with Iran, I’ll forget.
But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.