He carried his bag and was accompanied by a nurse with a deliberately impassive face—the sort of face that seemed to say, “I don’t care what you die … - Walter Tevis

And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, in what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?”
I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”

"Is there a God?" I said. "I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?"
"No. I'm not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God."
"Oh," I said.
"It doesn't bother you," the voice said. "You may think it does; but it doesn't. You're really on your own. You've been learning that."