There is nothing so unsatisfactory as an ending with loose ends, this modern tendency to leave books incomplete.

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

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...

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...

Amy's basically exploiting the sociopath's most reliable maxim. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people...

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. {"America: Three Audiences"}

It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last...

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.

Is that which science calls the "psyche" not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing...

He feels the need to hear a human voice-a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion-his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.