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?
It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light.
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.
He himself did not blame the president – it wasn’t the president’s fault that the Chinese had decided to honor their pact.
Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.
Prosperous, happy, fruitful... the Latin word “Felix” occurs in such injunctions as that by God himself, who in Genesis 1:21 says to all the creatures of the world, “Be fruitful and increase, fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds increase on land.” This is the essence of the meaning of Felix, this command from God, this loving command, this manifestation of his desire that we not only live but that we live happily and prosperously.
Evil, Mr. Tagomi thought. Yes, it is. Are we to assist it in gaining power, in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation? I cannot face this dilemma, Mr. Tagomi said to himself. That man should have to act in such moral ambiguity. There is no Way in this; all is muddled. All chaos of light and dark, shadow and substance.
He understood that for all intents and purposes he was now under arrest for his suicide attempt.
The bedrock basic stratum of reality is irreality; the universe is irrational because it is built not on mere shifting sand – but on that which is not.
Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.
Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The.
Logically, Sherri should have squeezed every moment of pleasure out of life during her remission, but the mind does not function logically, as Fat had figured out. Sherri spent her time anticipating the loss of her remission.
I don’t know if you can call that thing around his neck a tie. They tried to hang him, perhaps, and he proved too heavy; he broke the rope and continued on about his business.
In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.
He awoke – and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely. “Are.
If I die,′ she murmured, ’maybe I’ll be born again when the Rosen Association stamps out its next unit of my subtype.
Do androids dream?