Quotes from VALIS ( 1981 )

It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things; get off dope (which he hadn't done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).

...it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

This time in America - 1960 to 1970 - and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked.

I am by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy.

The counterculture possessed a whole book of phrases which bordered on meaning nothing.

By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.   I wish I could have helped him.

I'm not sure God did anything at all for him; in fact in some ways God made him sicker.

Fat was certain that God had healed him completely. That is not possible. There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." That fits my friend.

There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.

After he had encountered God, Fat developed a love for him which was not normal.

People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.

He felt sure the universe had begun to talk to him.

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.

In my opinion a FUCK YOU, GOD sign would have been approppriate; the rosary was not.

He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.

We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation because he always got angry, taking the point of view that what we said on the topic mattered - that the topic itself mattered. By now he had become totally whacked out.

"God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn't give a shit. Or all three."

Kevin said, "How do you say Hagia Stupid? St. Stupid?" "Hagia Moron," Horse said. He always defended himself by giving in.

Being a Catholic, David always traced everything wrong back to man's free will. This used to annoy even me.

A question we had to deal with during the dope decade was, How do you break the news to someone that his brains are fried?

I like solutions that answer a variety of problems simultaneously.

During the years - outright years! - that he laboured on his exegesis, Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked.

The universe has a habit of deleting anachronisms. I saw this coming for Fat if he didn't get his shit together.

"There's something in the Bible about falling sparrows," Kevin said. "About his eye being on them. That's what's wrong with God; he only has one eye."

As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.

The changing information which we experience as World is an unfolding narrative. It tells about the death of a woman.

If, in reading this, you cannot see that Fat is writing about himself, then you understand nothing.

You cannot say that an encounter with God is to mental illness what death is to cancer.

How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient?

…and yet our world is only seeming; it is only "obvious structure," whichis under the mastery of unseen "latent structure." Horselover Fat would like you to consider this above all other things.

At one point, while Fat lay on his back gazing up at the cathode-tube screen over his head, a straight line showed; his heart had stopped beating. He continued to watch, and finally the trace dot resumed its wave-form. The mercies of God are infinite.

A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

"You were mentally dying! From stress and fear! That's how it's done - reaching into the next reality! The dream-time!"

"The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself. That one sentence appeared over and over again in his exegesis; it had become his tag line.

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

They can bill you for being crazy and if you don't pay or can't pay they can sue you, and if a court judgment is issued against you and you fail to comply, they can lock you up again, as being in contempt of court.

"The TV lounge has devils in it."

1) Those who agree with you are insane. 2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.

"But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind." "But he could be irrational." "How would we know?" "The whole universe would be irrational." "Compared with what?"

"You would know…You're the authority."

Fat had decided to bind himself to the Antichrist.And out of the highest possible motives: out of love, gratitude and the desire to help her.

"Sherri, why don't you cut out all the sections of Bible you agree with and paste them together? And not have to deal with the rest."

Once, when I lectured at the University of California at Fullerton, a student asked me for a short, simple definition of reality. I thought it over and answered, "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."

"Everybody who comes in this door wants to die. That's what mental illness is all about."

To Sherri, the world was divided up among slackers, maniacs, junkes, homosexuals and back-stabbing friends. She also had little use for Mexicans and blacks. Fat used to wonder at her total lack of Christian charity, in the emotional sense. How could -why would - Sherri want to work in a church and fix her sights on religious orders when she resented, feared and detested every living human being, and, most of all, complained about her lot in life?

The Godhead is impaired; some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.

29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."

You can understand why Fat no longer knew the difference between fantasy and divine revelation - assuming there is a difference, which has never been established.

…underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man; and we are that man.

We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and, as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis.

Thomas was the ultimate non-fool of Post Neolithic times. As an early Christian, of the apostolic age; he had not seen Jesus but he knew people who had - my God, I'm losing control, here, trying to write this down…

Are we all like Horselover Fat, but don't know it? How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?

Morons and simps appear on the screen, drool like pinheads and waterheads; zitfaced kids scream in ecstatic approval of total banality. I turn the TV set ioff.

Personally, I don't want to break any new theological or philosophical ground. But I had to meet Horselover Fat; I had to get to know him and share his harebrained ideas based on his peculiar encounter with God knows what. With ultimate reality, maybe.

In the centre of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man…

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

Pain and suffering made no sense to Fat; he could not fit it into the grand design.

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

"My ex-wives are descended from rats."

"I am programmed to self-destruct," fat said. "The button has been pressed."

For Fat, total psychosis was a mercy.

It is not God nor the gods which must prevail; it is wisdom, Holy Wisdom.

"This is an irreal world. You realise that, I'm sure. VALIS made you realise that. We are in a living maze and not in a world at all."

"Unless your past perishes…you are doomed."

"What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves…"

"You are to follow one rule: you are to love one another as you love me and as I love you, for this love proceeds from the true god, which is yourselves."

"Many claim to speak for god, but there is only one god and that god is man himself."

I was present that day, the last time the disciples sat at table. You may believe me; you may not.

"That's our commission; to sit in a bar and drink. That'l sure save the world. And why save it anyhow?"

Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

"Then the true name for religion…is death."

"I'd write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human beings could be as irrational as we are, as we've acted."

"Madness has its own dynamism; it just goes on."

"Sometimes I dream-" "I'll put that on your gravestone."