Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead...

Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.

Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead.

First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had...

That goat, Rachael said. You love the goat more than me. More than you love your wife, probably. First the goat, then your wife, then last of all- She laughed merrily. What can you do but laugh?

Wherever you go, ”the old man said," you will always want to create evil from you. This is the basic principle of life - violence against one's own personality. Every living being at some point in...

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The...

The TV set shouted, "-duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot-designed specifically for...

Don't pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary. For us both. He

Does this cure your depression? he asked her. It cures mine. Iran said, It certainly does cure my depression. Now we can admit to everybody that the sheep's false. No need to do that, he said...

Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself finally.

“Wherever you go, you will be asked to do something wrong. It is the fundamental condition of life to be forced to do violence to one's personality. Sooner or later, all living creatures must do...

It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

After her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between...

She smiled innocuously-at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait,...

Yet, the dark fire waned: the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine...

How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not now know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless.

If I'm an andy," Phil Resch said, "and you kill me, you can have my squirrel. Here; I'll write it out, willing it to you.

It is over, isn't it? Trustingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they...

We trust-I'll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it's our goddamn superior intelligence!

Our Universe is moving towards the final stage of complete and absolute Clutter.

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I...

This is a universal darkness, the collapse of the universe; A curse in action, a curse that lies throughout life. Anywhere in the universe.

Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over...

I see,' Rick said. He felt numb. Completely. Throughout his entire body.

You got me out of this place and here's your reward; you're everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we're committed to destroy.

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic...

within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I...

Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I've undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn't new. But it was....

She'll probably want to, once I show her how; as near as I can make out, most women, even young ones like her, like to cook: it's an instinct.