If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the...

God’s M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can’t perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality,...

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional...

Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don’t know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you’re not paid...

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray...

There is evil! It’s actual, like cement.I can’t believe it. I can’t stand it.Evil is not a view … it’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds,...

The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst … said about his binges...

Era come se avessi tremato per tutta la vita, a causa di una cronica corrente sotterranea di paura. Tremare, scappare, finire nei guai, perdere le persone che amavo. Come un personaggio dei cartoni animati invece...

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it – grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love...

I am life,’ the girl said.‘What?’ he said, startled.‘To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re...

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.

This is a mournful discovery.1)Those who agree with you are insane2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I’m the one that’s alive. You’re all dead.

We came back [from Mars],” Pris said, “because nobody should have to live there. It wasn’t conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It’s so old. You feel it in the...

To live is to be haunted.

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...

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we...

I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the...

On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I’ve seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she’s...

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

The jukebox played some hillbilly tune; steel guitar and emotion-choked moaning…

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.

He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into...

Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up...

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain...

It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic...

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time...

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.

That’s what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever’s in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it…

You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty...

If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must...

Insane people — psychologically defined, not legally define — are not in touch with reality.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.

I’m not much but I’m all I have.

What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be...

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence–a series of words–which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the...

It’s easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you...

What you should do,” she told Fat during one of his darker hours, “is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.” Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a...

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John...

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.