More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every child in the world imagines that its phantasy world is unique to itself. Psychiatry knows that the joys and terrors of private phantasies are a common heritage shared by all mankind. Fears, guilts, terrors, and shames could be interchanged, from one man to the next, and none would notice the difference.
He learned to deafen himself to the therapeutic monotony and perform his occupational therapy mechanically, but he was without resources to withstand the endless solitary hours. Fury was not enough.
Then he lost even this feeble grasp on illusion and began to sink deeper and deeper into the pit of catatonia: of womb silence, womb darkness, and womb sleep.
“Much better. The old fakir was right, Yoga is the answer. Control. Pulse, breath, bowels, brains.”
There’s one thing to be said for the outlawed religions…At least they built churches big enough to house a circus.”
Damnation! It’s as though he’s dead. He is dead. And I’ve got to figure how to beat a dead body and make it feel pain.
“I’ve been a tiger all my life. I trained myself…educated myself…pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth…quick and deadly….”
“Man, you space-jaunted!” Sheffield said savagely. “You were patched and delirious, but you space-jaunted. You space-jaunted six hundred thousand miles through the void back to the wreck of the Nomad. You did something that’s never been done before. God knows how. You don’t even know yourself, but we’re going to find out. I’m taking you out to the Satellites with me and we’ll get that secret out of you if we have to tear it out.”
Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or, perhaps, they were stripped from him.
He reverted from a conditioned product of environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape and survival and exercising every power it possessed.
He went hurtling along the geodesical space lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light.
He went flickering along the new near-horizontal axis, this new space-time geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited by concepts of the impossible.
But I’m not a robot. I’m a freak of the universe…a thinking animal…and I’m trying to see my way clear through this morass.
“Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.” “To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?” “Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”
Josh Schober liked this
“Am I? I’ve handed life and death back to the people who do the living and dying. The common man’s been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us….Compulsive men…Tiger men who can’t help lashing the world before them. We’re all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we’re compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?”
“Then let them learn or die. We’re all in this together. Let’s live together or die together.”
“No. I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they’re kicked awake like I was.”
You got the most in you, and you use the least.
Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel
empties. All a you. E...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.” He disappeared.
“It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”
NOW: Rigel in Orion, burning blue-white, five hundred and forty light years from earth, ten thousand times more luminous than the sun, a cauldron of energy circled by thirty-seven massive planets…Foyle hung, freezing and suffocating in space, face to face with the incredible destiny in which he believed, but which was still inconceivable. He hung in space for a blinding moment, as helpless, as amazed, and yet as inevitable as the first gilled creature to come out of the sea and hang gulping on a primeval beach in the dawn-history of life on earth.
Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination.
Josh Schober liked this
