The Lathe of Heaven

Be he’s not a mad scientist, Orr thought dully, he’s a pretty sane one, or he was. It’s the chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part, and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he’s using even his science as a means, not an end … But his ends are good, aren’t they? He wants to impr

I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.” She believed him, and denied her belief with fury. “So what? Mayb

He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.

The only solid partitions left were inside the head.

There is very little schizophrenia in this world—did you know that? It’s a rare disease!” Haber’s dark eyes shone, his lips grinned.

“But if you do find out, will you tell me how to stop?” Haber rocked back largely on his heels. “Why are you so afraid of yourself, George?”

“Volcanoes emit fire,” Orr murmured.