“To save one life, Mr Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that”

“The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that — as if that weren't enough — but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.”

“Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.”

“Nothing. Heart pounding. Respiration and all somatic processes including all manner of diencephalic-controlled autonomic responses to crises: adrenalin greater heartbeat pulse rate glands pouring throat paralysed eyes staring bowels loose et al. Stomach queasy and sex instinct suppressed. And yet nothing to see nothing for body to do. Run All in preparation for panic flight. But where to and why Mr Tagomi asked himself. No clue. Therefore impossible. Dilemma of civilized man body mobilized but danger obscure.”

“We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and time creations of our own psyche and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear.Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.”

“Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”

“Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.”