More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You got to be careful, he thought, when you come to a strange chick on the street; they’re all prepared now. Too much has happened to them.
Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.
What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person.
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.
You know what wolves do? The male wolf? When he defeats his foe, he doesn’t snuff him—he pees on him. Really! He stands there and pees on his defeated foe and then he splits. That’s
You should be able to use the first thing that came to hand to achieve your objective, Barris preached. A thumbtack, a paper clip, part of an assembly the other part of which was broken or lost
“I plan to write a bestseller eventually,” Barris said. “A text for the average person about how to manufacture safe dope in his kitchen without breaking the law. You see, this does not break the law. Benzocaine is legal. I phoned a pharmacy and asked them. It’s in a lot of things.”
It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.
There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor.
One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with
...more
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.
As to “priceless works of art” he wasn’t too sure, because he didn’t exactly understand what that meant. At My Lai during the Viet Nam War, four hundred and fifty priceless works of art had been vandalized to death at the orders of the CIA—priceless works of art plus oxen and chickens and other animals not listed. When he thought about that he always got a little dingey and was hard to reason with about paintings in museums like that.
“Do you think,” he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, “that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically? Because I don’t want to have God boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, ‘So you’re the little boy who stole the three Coke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and you’ve got a lot of fast talking to do.’”
“Sin,” Barris said, chuckling, “is a Jewish-Christian myth that is outdated.”
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly.
How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.
“The most dangerous kind of person,” Arctor said, “is one who is afraid of his own shadow.”
“Imagine getting an angry pay-up-or-go-to-court letter from an attorney about a dope deal,” Arctor said, marveling at Donna, as he frequently did.
time she had ever come along with him—he had met her at a head party—and he knew very little about her, although he’d carried
Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
“It’s a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, ‘What was it like to see the first automobile?’ Shit, man, I was born in 1962.”
‘Okay, then if it’s a hysterical pregnancy I’ll get a hysterical abortion and pay for it with hysterical money.’”
“He had no idea, and he hasn’t any idea now, because now he hasn’t any ideas. You know that as well as I do. And he will never again in his life, as long as he lives, have any ideas. Only reflexes. And this didn’t happen accidentally; it was supposed to happen.
The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love the most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.
If your mind comes back it’ll have to come back naturally. You can’t make yourself think again. You can only keep working, such as sowing crops or tilling on our vegetable plantations—as we call them—or killing insects.
There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past.
The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead—he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him—should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.
