Quotes from book

The Man in the High Castle

“We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.”

“What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?”

“Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane.”

“We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.”

“On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.”

“We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

“When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. … I must be scientific.”

“Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.”

“Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.”

“Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn’t Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?”

“That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.”

“Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical — I believe it.”

“This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.”

“I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both.”

“Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?”

“(Hawthorne Abendsen) told us about our own world. This, what's around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment.”

“We have entered a Moment when we are alone. We cannot get assistance, as before. Well, Mr. Tagomi thought, perhaps that too is good. Or can be made good. One must still try to find the Way.”

“Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined…or one great figure…or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.”

“You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.”