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had conjectured (one needs a theory for everything)
Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none.
the Arco gas station (regular now a dollar two cents a gallon),
This change in him as Fred was an economy of the passions.
Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind—everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate or not.
to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A recording. A closed loop of tape.
There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor.
It will be a hindsight I won’t even get to have. Somebody else will have to have it for me.
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.
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.
He had witnessed junkies feeding and caring for injured animals over long periods of time, where straights probably would have had the animals “put to sleep,”
They did not know whose cat she was;
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly.
Knowing what I know, I still stepped across into that freaked-out paranoid space with them,
the cat empties a pillowcase and starts stuffing your valuables in it:
another cat entirely while you’re gone, ripping you off and pawning it all, or lighting up your joints, or walking on the ceiling, or phoning people long distance
a weird other world beyond ...
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The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.”
that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place. Not for their sake. For mine.
Mark and if possible permanently record, so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.
“They say you’re completely cuckoo.” Fred (as best he could) shrugged. “Completely?”
go up into the hills, up into the San Bernardino Mountains near one of the lakes,
With that guy, though, instead of merely becoming smarter, he had seen God. It had been a complete surprise to him.
I don’t even care how it got started, when or why. She thought, I just hope it’ll end some time.
Before the curse, and everything and everyone became this way. The Golden Age,
“Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.”
“Motion that is circular is the deadest form of the universe.”
The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can’t understand: they are our camera.
When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
