152 quotes
We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
This hypnagogic condition. Attention-faculty diminished so that twilight state obtains; world seen merely in symbolic, archetypal aspect, totally confused with unconscious material.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Fully absorbed in the peculiar text he had become totally oblivious to the noises and movements around him; all that existed for him now was the printed page held motionless before his intense scrutiny.
Lies, Inc (1984)
He now set down all the communications apparatus, rose stiffly from the chair and momentarily stood facing the misty, immobile, icebound shape of Joe Chip resting within its transparent plastic casket. Upright and silent, as it would be for the rest of eternity.
Ubik (1969)
You have seen these things. You know a great deal. And you are not coordinated with the new configuration.
Adjustment Team (1954)
You saw something you were not supposed to see — something few elements have been aware of, let alone witnessed.
Adjustment Team (1954)
It was himself, but a far-away self. A self he would never meet.
The Golden Man (1954)
To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.
VALIS (1981)
He was always moving, advancing into new regions he had never seen before. A constantly unfolding panorama of sights and scenes, frozen landscapes spread out ahead. All objects were fixed.
The Golden Man (1954)
(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
He had weaved between them and among them as they came, a dancer leaping over glittering sword-points of pink fire. He had survived.
The Golden Man (1954)
I did not attend the services, because it seems to me, as Pythagoras says, the body is the tomb of the soul and that by being born a person has already begun to die.
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)
Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt.
Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
Our methods may seem strange and indirect. Even incomprehensible. But I assure you we know what we're doing.
Adjustment Team (1954)
Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)