Naomi’s Reviews > Kallocain > Status Update

“Censor’s postscript” Hung Pai Fo put the document in the “Secret Archive of the Universal State.” Hmmm so does that mean that there wasn’t really an “outside” enemy that took over where Leo lived? He just hopes for a new world. That people inside “The State” he lives in took ever? Changed stuff up. Interesting very interesting.

“…sometimes, as I sit on my bunk with my eyes closed, I can see the gleam of the stars and hear the murmur of the wind as I did that night, and I cannot, I cannot eradicate from my soul the illusion that still, in spite of everything, I am taking part in the creation of a new world.”

“…there was a chance that Linda was still alive. Perhaps Rissen, too, if they had not managed to execute him yet. I admit that it is an improbable fantasy, and were I to listen to my common sense I ought surely to spend the rest of my life in despair. As that is not the case, perhaps it merely shows that my instinct for self-preservation compels me to seek comfort in delusion.”

“…and another group of terrified informers would listen to a new Rissen. It was superstition, of course, as nothing can happen twice, but there was nothing else that I could do. It was only faint chance of being able to carry on where I had been stopped.”

“I gave them my discovery for the simple reason that I wanted it to survive. If Chemistry City No. 4 were to be razed to the ground, if the whole World State were to be turned into a desert of ash and stone, at least I would be able to think that somewhere in other countries and among other people a new Linda would speak like the first one, voluntarily, when someone tried to force her,…”

“We were not victims of a night-training exercise. We were prisoners of the enemy.”

“I felt that I touched the living depths that Rissen had cried out for and Linda had known and seen. ‘Don’t you know that this is where life springs up?’ the woman had said in my dream. I believed her, and was certain that anything at all could happen.”

“What I saw and heard might be mirages; yet they had only lent form to another universe, a universe from within – where I was used to encountering a dry, shrivelled shell that I called myself.“

“The wind was still blowing, though more faintly, and I knew that it was born not from the darkness of space but from atmospheric layers near the earth. The stars still twinkled as brightly, and I reminded myself that their pulse-beats of light were an optical illusion. But it didn’t matter.”

“When I woke to awareness of myself again, I was sitting on the wall around the roof terrace and shivering, not with cold, as it was a warm, almost hot night, but with powerful emotion.”