Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor,… - Philip K. Dick

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence — meant to supplant all things tangible.

People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

"People like your wife are dangerous." "Why?" Hamilton asked. "They don’t belong to any group. They fool around with everything. As soon as we turn our back—" "So you destroy them. You turn them over to the lunatic patriots." "The lunatic patriots," McFeyffe said, "we can understand. But not your wife. She signs Party peace petitions and she reads the Chicago Tribune. People like her—they’re more of a menace to Party discipline than any other bunch. The cult of individualism. The idealist with his own law, his own ethics. Refusing to accept authority. It undermines society. It topples the whole structure. Nothing lasting can be built on it. People like your wife just won’t take orders."

"Why?" Hamilton lashed out suddenly and loudly. "Why the hell did God answer that prayer? Why not some of the others? Why not Bill Laws’s?" "God approved of your prayer," Silky said. "After all, it’s up to Him; He has to decide how He feels about it." "That’s terrible." Silky shrugged. "Maybe so." "How can you live with that? You never know what’s going to happen—there’s no order, no logic." It infuriated him that she did not object, that it seemed natural to her. "We’re helpless; we have to depend on whim. It keeps us from being people—we’re like animals waiting to be fed. Rewarded or punished."