The man bobbed toylike in front of him, meanwhile digging into his pocket as if scratching at a familiar micro-organism that possessed parasitic proclivities that had survived the test of time.
One seeks to contravene one’s perceptions – why? So that one can wander utterly lost, without signposts or guide?
Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it’s banned within Reich territory;.
Jesus Christ!” I said. “You can’t sleep with a bishop!” “I already have,” Kirsten said.
Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately.
The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.
I couldn’t do that. How can you live like that? You’ve got to have people you can depend on, somebody strong, somebody to take care of you. This is a big frigid world, completely bleak and hostile and empty of warmth. You know what happens to you if you let go and fall?
Okay, I’ll come back again on Thursday.
One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.
Of course, the way they put it, the idea was if we had to buy our gas masks and bomb shelters we’d take better care of them. As if we ever damaged telephones and sidewalks. Or highways, because the whole state provided them. Or armies.
Going to the closet – it was the ancient-style manual variety – he hung up his coat.
A dream woke me,” Arctor said. “A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and God appeared and His voice rumbled at me-what the hell did He say?-oh yeah. ‘I am vexed with you, my son’ He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, ‘What’d I do now, Lord?’ And He said, ‘You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.’ And then I realized it was my ex-wife.
Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.
His thoughts,” Helio said, “are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him. We are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land.” At that Arnie laughed loud and long. “Truth always amuses the ignorant,” Helio said.
We made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up.
We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a “fake” as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have 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.
Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.
Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic.
That’s really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?
To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn’t have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal.