You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So...
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people...
Yet, the dark fire waned: the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine...
When you are Atlas you must carry a heavy load and if you drop it a lot of people suffer...
When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. Now I must seek in other realms.
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become f...
Thomas, Fat told me, is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality. He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other per...
There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.
The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Noth...
The old man said, ‘You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives mus...
The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.
The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can commun...
The ignorance of the dark-skinned strata, despite the government’s ceaseless educational campaigns. No wonder their women were often preg.
The first thing that went wrong, according to Fat, had to do with the radio. Listening to it one night- he had not been able to sleep for a long time- he heard the radio saying hideous words, sentence...
The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this i...
The Public School, then, was right to eject a child who did not learn. Because what the child was learning was not merely facts or the basis of a money-making or even useful career. It went much deepe...
The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurot...
Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell, Elias said. We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and...
Ruth said, Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apar...
Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself finally.