The Man in the High Castle (Penguin Modern Classics)

It is therapeutic to meet these people who have intimidated you. And to discover what they are really like. Then the intimidation goes.

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

gnomish quality about everything. A smaller-than-life quality, with a dash of the droll. What is this five-thousand-year-old book? The Mickey Mouse watch, Mr Tagomi himself, the fragile cup in Mr Tagomi’s hand … and, on the wall facing Mr Baynes, an enormous buffalo head, ugly and menacing.

He was obsessed with the idea that the universe was only apparently real, an illusion behind which the truth might dwell.

Grasshopper

Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself – they were the hope of the world, Place difference did not have the significance for them.

Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately.

But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

Back at last to seeing. Highest ranking of the senses: Greek scale of priority. He turned the silver triangle each and every way; he viewed it from every extra rem standpoint.

However, in those cases, the wu is within the viewer. It is a religious experience. Here, an artificer has put wu into the object, rather than merely witnessed the wu inherent in it.’