Lucius Shepard Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

And then along came Satan's Eye Itself. Television. He laughed, as at some fatal irony. Don't you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It's the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan's imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies!

Lucius Shepard
The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this—thought Jocundra—a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia.

Lucius Shepard
Manipulate? Yes, I manipulated. And despite the ensuing events, I would do so again, for it is the function of psychiatry to encourage the living to live.

Lucius Shepard
I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes.

Lucius Shepard
An attic's the afterlife of a house, said Otille, opening the door. Or so my mother used to say.

Lucius Shepard
Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process.

Lucius Shepard
That's the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, to define with theory.

Lucius Shepard
It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood.

Lucius Shepard
We uncovered new forces, we took a step along what may be an endless path toward divinity, we redirected the entire thrust of psychoanalytic theory, and, as with all knowledge, we found that deeper and more compelling mysteries yet lay beyond those we had reduced to the security of fact.

Lucius Shepard
The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe.

Lucius Shepard
If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys.

Lucius Shepard