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237 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
"God promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it...You're not just out of your body; you're out of your mind, too...When we return to our former bodies...you'll find that no time has passed...It will only be after a few tries that they realise the two different aspects: the lack of a time lapse and the other, perhaps the more vital. That it isn't fantasy, that they enter a genuine new universe...
"...each person goes to a different subjective world..."
"Be anything you want - you took the drug; you're entitled to be translated into whatever pleases you. It's not real, of course...it's an hallucination. What makes it seem real is that certain prophetic aspects get into the experience, exactly as with dreams."
"That's why I say it means genuine reincarnation, triumph over death."
"They're a product of my mind, not of the lichen."
"It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candour, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me."
"Most of what Eldritch did - or does, if you prefer to regard it that way - consists of manufacturing surface changes: he makes things appear the way he wants, but that doesn't mean they are. Follow me?"
"The fantasy worlds that Chew-Z induces, he thought, are in Palmer Eldritch's head...And the trouble is, he thought, that once you get into one of them, you can't quite scramble back out; it stays with you, even when you think you're free. It's a one-way gate...The rest of us [mere phantasms] just inhabit them and when he wants to he can inhabit them, too...Even be any of us, in fact, if he desires. Eternal, outside of time and spliced together segments of all other dimensions...he can even enter a world in which he's dead."
"What met Eldritch and entered him, what we're confronting, is a being superior to ourselves and as you say we can't judge it or make sense out of what it does or wants; it's mysterious and beyond us...Something which stands with empty, open hands is not God. It's a creature fashioned by something higher than itself, as we were; God wasn't fashioned and He isn't puzzled."
"The ability of phantasms to manipulate material objects makes it clear that they are present and not merely projections."