211 quotes found
“You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you.""I know," Benteley agreed. "I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only h...”
“Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large ...”
“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 thi...”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you––about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.“No," Rick said. “I’m glad to know. ...”
“Insane people -- psychologically defined, not legally define -- are not in touch with reality.”
“He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward in...”
“You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer.""Did he show you slides?"We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at wh...”
“It isn't a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I'll tell you what it is: it's the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance . . . to find new things . . . to expand. To...”
“I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the firs...”
“If this place were closer to Terra there’d be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There’d be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heav...”
“It’s not just the drive. They’re right out front. Everywhere. Waiting for me. All day and night.”“Who are, dear?”“Robots selling things. As soon as I set down the ship. Robots and visual-audio ads....”
“Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way h...”
“I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tel...”
“What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russi...”
“A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, ...”
“Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat ...”
“A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interper...”
“Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.”
“I am life,’ the girl said.‘What?’ he said, startled.‘To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re ...”
“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get t...”
