Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on...

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection--the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome: The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure...

How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love's illusion. And...

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like...

I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming...

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;

The man who believes he can deceive the system and deceive us is definitely mentally ill.

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism -- anything that will keep from exposing the...

When someone is telling you their story over and over, they are trying to figure something out.

The truth is that torture creates the torturers

In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have...

I wonder why reality has to be simple. My experience has taught me that, on the contrary, it is rarely so, and when there is something that seems extraordinarily clear, an action that appears to obey...

Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts...

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos

Why do you think people cheat?," I asked."Because they're bored? Because they can? Because they're selfish and think they're entitled to anything they want? Because they don't think they'll get...

Betsy: "Do you have daddy issues, Warren?" Warren: "Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain."

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

Fears are nothing more than a state of mind.

Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by...

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves...

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, is "insane." To

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.