El tiempo, ay, daba prisa a los hombres.
Mercerism is a swindle.′ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.
Fat, pondering and writing and doing research and receiving dribs and drabs of messages from Zebra during hypnagogic states and in dreams, and attempting to salvage something from the wreck of his life, had decided to go in search of the Savior. He would find him wherever he was.
I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.
I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create.
The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups wile composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens – that just can’t be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.
The alleged sheep contained an oat-tropic circuit; at the sight of such cereals it would scramble up convincingly and amble over.
Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.
Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.
May I stop at that amphetamine dispenser and put in my dime? I need a stimulant to cheer me up.
The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
I think they should be the rulers,’ Juliana said, pausing. ‘They always were the best. The British.
I need you,” he said. Otherwise I’m going to die, he said to himself.
They expected miracles, evidently, as if the Nazis could remold the world by magic. No, it was science and technology and that fabulous talent for hard work; the Germans never stopped applying themselves. And when they did a task, they did it right.
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all.
One of God’s greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded.
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.
No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.” “But,” Paul said, “it deals with alternate present.
Half to himself, Fat said, “He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
Remove his shirt,” a voice stated. No doubt building’s physician. Highly authoritative tone; Mr. Tagomi smiled. Tone is everything.