I think," Dr. Stone said, "that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time.
We do not have the 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.
What did anything mean? he wondered. And how did a person tell? We can never be certain. Not until our dying day. And maybe not even then. All of us, he thought, are down here fumbling around, guessing and calculating. Doing the best we can.
I don't have time to read popular fiction. I'm too busy with work.' Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they're afraid of. But of course really crave.
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.
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 responsibility existed.
Tears began to surge up into her eyes, and she found herself doubling up her fists, with the thumbs inside, as she had done as a child; she felt her jaw wobble, and when she spoke her voice could hardly be heard.
For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.
If you weren't an android, Rick interrupted, if I could legally marry you, I would.
It goes on, he thought. The internecine hate. Perhaps the seeds are there, in that. They will eat one another at last, and leave the rest of us here and there in the world, still alive. Still enough of us once more to build and hope and make a few simple plans.
The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
It does not have wabi, Paul said, nor could it ever. But— He touched the pin with his nail. Robert, this object has wu.
I am a mask, concealing the real.
I wish I'd become a plant earlier.
Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I've undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn't new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.
If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.
He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.
Movies like 'Westworld' used ideas I'd thought of a long time ago.
In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.
It's—it's a variable. Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can't deal with him. The variable man!
Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. What is that? he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. Awful, ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.
As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child's rag ball.
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.
No rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic.
We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter—like acute disturbance of middle ear. Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.
It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.
Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer's eyes, I probably will never stop.
After all, they had barely managed to win the war, and at once they had gone off to conquer the solar system, while at home they had passed edicts which . . . well, at least the idea was good.
In the enormous whale-belly of steel and stone carved out to form the long-enduring old opera house, Rick Deckard found an echoing, noisy, slightly miscontrived rehearsal taking place.
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 joy of discovery of newness.
I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.
Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other... now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.
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, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth.
There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters.
Anti-cat is one jump away from anti-Semitism.
There was one, a Mr. Omuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank's landlord. There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents.
Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.
Telepathic power and empathy are two versions of the same thing.
Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn't Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article.
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 somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.
Dreadful low-class jingoistic racist invectives, unworthy of me.
She laughed merrily. What can you do but laugh?
Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts....
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.
