Invasion of the Body Snatchers

“The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.”

“If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.”

“Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well.”

“Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it’s your function, your reason for being. There’s no other reason, and none needed.”

“The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing,” he said reflectively, “but I’m not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe—from sub-atomic particles to the universe—except itself.”

“Anyway, there’s a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn’t the time.”

“Labor-saving technology was supposed to give us more leisure time, but a greater percentage of our waking hours is spent in work or work-related tasks than ever before, as we spin like squirrels in exercise cages, desperate to keep current with change and therefore employable.”

“The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not.”

“But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don’t teach that at medical school, but it’s as important as your stethoscope.”

“the very moment you are caught, there is always a chance.”

“You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you.”

“it occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act;”

“I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun—not the end of the butt, but the side—hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don’t read much about blood clots in the brain. In actual fact, though, it’s a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head,”

“I saw my father’s wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they’d been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.”

“She was too attractive, likeable, and good-looking, and the danger in that was obvious.”

“Of course we could have failed; I could have wrecked her life; but that made me no different from any other man who might have done the same thing.”

“You worried or something, Miles? Seem a little absent-minded tonight.” I smiled and shrugged. “Just taking my work home with me, I guess.” “Mustn’t do that, boy; I never did. Forgot all about the bank the minute I put my hat on at night. ’Course you don’t get to be president that way.” He grinned. “But the president’s dead now, and I’m still alive.”

“door,”

“front”

“Out”

“If I dreamed, no traces remained in my memory; I simply left the world and life for complete exhausted oblivion.”

“Maybe the new one would actually know how to write, instead of beating his head against a stone wall just trying.”