"The Lathe of Heaven"

This is not the type of books I would pick up but for the fact that Ursula K. le Guin wrote it. It still messes up one's head too much for my liking, and Orr as the idealized non-doer tries one's patience sometimes, but the writing is impressive enough that I don't mind the trip.

• for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
  But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life.
  And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....
  What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
• 'Couldn't find the fit,' he said, meaning that he had been trying to lock the door through which the dreams came, but none of the keys had fit the lock.
• Ah, the hell with it. I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy.... '
• in offices all up and down the hall and above him and underneath him, The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The only solid partitions left were inside the head.
• Of course a horse is the perfect anachronism, but I like the picture; it has vigor, strength—total self-realization in animal terms. It's a sort of ideal of what a psychiatrist strives to achieve in human psychological terms, a symbol.
• I thought that maybe, since you suggested the dream to me, you might have the double memory, like me. But I guess you don't.' But his eyes, no longer downcast, looked again at Haber with that clarity, that forbearance, that quiet and despairing plea for help.
• There was a warmth to the man, an outgoingness, which was real; but it had got plasticoated with professional mannerisms, distorted by the doctor's unspontaneous use of himself. Orr felt in him a wish to be liked and a desire to be helpful; the doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
• No good. No way out. Orr was where he had been for months—alone: knowing he was insane and knowing he was not insane, simultaneously and intensely. It was enough to drive him insane.
• Above the heads of those now riding the GPRT train in the Broadway Tunnel were tons of rock and gravel, tons of water running, the piles of wharves and the keels of ocean-going ships, the huge concrete supports of elevated freeway bridges and approaches, a convoy of steamer trucks laden with frozen battery-produced chickens, one jet plane at 34,000 feet, the stars at 4.3+ light-years. George Orr, pale in the flickering fluorescent glare of the train car in the infrafluvial dark, swayed as he stood holding a swaying steel handle on a strap among a thousand other souls. He felt the heaviness upon him, the weight bearing down endlessly.
• Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. —H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
• soft white skin like a fish's belly; meek, mild, stuttering. Shit! If she stepped on him he wouldn't even crunch.
• 'He's not. . . not an evil man. He means well. What I object to is his using me as an instrument, a means—even if his ends are good. I can't judge him—my own dreams had immoral effects, that's why I tried to suppress them with drugs, and got into this mess.
• Each dream covers its tracks completely. There would just be a normal everyday pink dog there when I woke up, with a perfectly good reason for being there. And nobody would be aware of anything new, except me—and him. I keep the two memories, of the two realities.
• Relevance was his touchstone. He would always keep one patient of his own, to remind him of that fundamental commitment, to keep him in contact with the human reality of his research in terms of the disturbed personality structure of individual people. For there is nothing important except people. A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
• a mess and jumble like all American cities, but unified by its hills and its misty, seven-bridged river, the old forty-story First National Bank building dominating the downtown skyline, and far beyond, above it all, the serene and pale mountains. . . .
• he had been there, had seen the walls change around him, had known the world was being remade, and had forgotten it. He had forgotten it so completely that he had never even wondered if a stranger, a third person, might have the same experience.
• There was a singular poise, almost a monumentally, in the stance of his slight figure: he was completely still, still as the center of something.
• He could not talk any more, the words were drying up on his tongue, turning to dry shreds of nonsense.
• It may remain for us to learn . . . that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking; — that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past; — that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire; — and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives. —Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East
• 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.
• What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.'
• 'You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?' The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.
  'No. I don't know anything about them. I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things. It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years.
• For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity. <> The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
• For all he knew, Haber was incapable of sincerity because he was lying to himself. He might be compartmenting his mind into two hermetic halves, in one of which he knew that Orr'sdreams changed reality, and employed them for that purpose; in the other of which he knew that he was using hypnotherapy and dream abreaction to treat a schizoid patient who believed that his dreams changed reality.
  That Haber could have thus got out of communication with himself was rather hard for Orr to conceive; his own mind was so resistant to such divisions that he was slow to recognize them in others. But he had learned that they existed. He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.
• the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night. —V. Hugo, Travailleurs de la Mer
• Manager wore the fringed buckskin coat, the Cody mane, the Aquarius emblem necklace of his youth: he apparently had not changed his clothes for thirty years. He had an accusing Dylan whine. He even smelled of marijuana. Old hippies never die.
• People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.
• t was no longer pleasant to exchange glances with the moon. It symbolized neither the Unattainable, as it had for thousands of years, nor the Attained, as it had for a few decades, but the Lost. A stolen coin, the muzzle of one's gun turned against one, a round hole in the fabric of the sky. The Aliens held the moon.
• And at the same time, the same day, they had destroyed the Russian space platform, the queer beautiful thing like a big thistledown seed that had orbited Earth, and from which the Russians were going to step off to Mars. Only ten years after the remission of the Plague, the shattered civilization of mankind had come back up like a phoenix, into orbit, to the Moon, to Mars: and had met this. Shapeless, speechless, reasonless brutality. The stupid hatred of the universe.
• He nodded. 'Would you like some coffee?' he asked. It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness?
  Like a block of wood not carved.
  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.
  Briefly she saw him thus, and what struck her most, of that insight, was his strength. He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.
• 'I guess so. I mean, I know something happened. I sure have been trying to run on two tracks with one set of wheels ever since. I walked right into a wall Sunday in my own apartment!
• 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?
  Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.
• He thinks you can make things come out right. And he tries to use me to make things come out right, but he won't admit it; he lies because he won't look straight, he's not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mind—his ideas of what ought to be.'
• Only it wasn't any home I'd ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn't remember it. I mostly don't. I can't. 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.'
• A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
• It was, Haber thought in emotionless horror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was encased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive look like a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.
• That's why she's not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born. <> He had, though. He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood.
• Cancer had evidently broken out again, like Mount Tabor and Mount Hood.
• Either, or. Where there's an opposed pair, a polarity, you're in the middle; where there's a scale, you're at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left. Now, Walters down at the Med School reads the results a bit differently; he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment, whatever that is, and that what I see as self-cancellation is a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony. By which you can see that, let's face it, old Walters is a pious fraud, he's never outgrown the mysticism of the seventies; but he means well. So there you have it, anyway: you're the man in the middle of the graph.
• I know you'd give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don't know whether what you're doing is good or evil or both....'
• Haber nodded, alert. 'No wonder you're depressed. You haven't yet fully accepted the use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to. This is a tough-minded world we've got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I said, life can't be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the future will justify it.
• Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would not have lived to thirty.
• He began, 'But where's democratic government got to? People can't choose anything at all any more for themselves. Why is everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can't even tell people apart—and the younger they are the more that's so.
• You have no social conscience, no altruism. You're a moral jellyfish. I have to instill social responsibility in you hypnotically, every time. And every time it's thwarted, spoiled.
• You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough. You have to... be in touch. He isn't in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesn't make any difference if his end is good; means are all we've got....
• They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . . But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. <> Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully—as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously.
• The A's tried to trip his feet. He stepped onto a moving walkway though it was not visible to him; he stepped onto the helical escalator and rode it up into nothing, supporting it continually by the firmness of his will. He did not even shut his eyes. <> Up on the top story, the floor was ice. It was about a finger's width thick, and quite clear. Through it could be seen the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Orr stepped out onto it and all the stars rang loud and false, like cracked bells.
• He knew where the Augmentor stood. He put out his mortal hand along the way things go. He touched it; felt for the lower button, and pushed it once. <> He crouched down then, covering his eyes and cowering, for the fear had taken his mind. When he raised his head and looked, the world re-existed. It was not in good condition, but it was there.
• The emptiness of Haber's being, the effective nightmare, radiating outward from the dreaming brain, had undone connections. The continuity which had always held between the worlds or timelines of Orr's dreaming had now been broken. Chaos had entered in. He had few and incoherent memories of this existence he was now in; almost all he knew came from the other memories, the other dreamtimes.
• All over the world the various gods were being requested, more or less politely, for an explanation of what had occurred between 6:25 and 7:08 P.M. Pacific Standard Time.
• 'Most of the tools and stuff. And the cookware. Look, do you like this?' He hauled out a copper-bottom teakettle, massive and yet elegant, as proportioned by necessity as a sailing ship.
• But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
• In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
• The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one.
• Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. 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.