Highlights from The Lathe of Heaven

“The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century.”

There was an acceptant, passive quality about him that seemed feminine, or even childish.

No doubt Haber had a lot of ambition and found it hard to believe that a man could be without it.

He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.

That one worked but didn’t get approved, it came under the brainwashing laws, we decided.

That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the tune—only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it.

But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.

To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one.

But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all.

Every step forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step backward.

There were still gray people now, it was said, particularly in the Middle West and Germany, but most of the rest had gone back to white, brown, black, red, yellow, and mixtures

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