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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 precious little fragment as well.
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Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.
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For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
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This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
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I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'
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That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
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'You of all people,' the void communicated. 'Out of everyone, it is you I love the most.'
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'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said.'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed.'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-''Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I’ll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won’t puzzle him.
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Fish cannot carry guns.
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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.
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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 the only healthy person. That's bad off, isn't it?
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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.
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The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.
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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.
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I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.
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Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane.
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We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
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To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.
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The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me.
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The vidphone company let me off the hook.
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That was my problem then and it's my problem now; I have a bad attitude. In a nutshell, I fear authority but at the same time I resent it - the authority and my own fear - so I rebel. And writing SF is a way to rebel. … SF is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers and bad attitudes - an attitude of 'Why?' or 'How come?' or 'Who says?'
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When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.
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Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. 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. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical - I believe it.
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You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury.