He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into...

Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he...

Guilt — if there was any guilt — spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of...

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought … Probably she’s the...

I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I...

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I...

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. “You have to let me in,” he says. “I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?”...

Io posso fare di meglio; posso metterla in commercio.

Everything is true,’ he said. ‘Everything anybody has ever thought.”Will you be all right?”I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.

David Hume, the great­est skep­tic of them all, once remarked that after a gath­er­ing of skep­tics met to pro­claim the verac­i­ty of skep­ti­cism as a phi­los­o­phy, all of the mem­bers of the gath­er­ing nonethe­less left...

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings...

You’re an unusual person,” she said.”Bill didn’t like you, but he never likes anything different. He’s so—so prosaic. Don’t you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened in his outlook?

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance...

We didn’t have sense enough to take care of it. Now it’s torn. And the artist is dead.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before...

It isn’t a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the highest goal of man – the need to grow and advance . . . to find...

I have seen myself backward.

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine-

We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. 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....

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed...

Cancer… the process of creation gone wild, I thought.

There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time,...

every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

The most dangerous kind of person… is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

You mean old books?””Stories written before space travel but about space travel.””How could there have been stories about space travel before –“”The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of...

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don’t know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and...

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial...

Amazed, Fat said, “She’s decomposing and yet she’s still giving birth?””Only to monsters,” Dr. Stone said.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the...

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, ‘The world is awful.’ Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I...

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten...

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue–the clue–lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and...

You’re – psychotic. There’s something wrong with you.””I know,” Benteley agreed. “I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m...

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....

I should not yield to it, he told himself once again as he walked along carrying the briefcase. Compulsion-obsession-phobia. But he could not free himself. It in my grip, I in its, he thought.

Just tell me why; why the fucking why?” To which the universe would hollowly respond, “My ways cannot be known, oh man.” Which is to say, “My ways do not make sense, nor do the...

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what...

…hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create – and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the...