The Man in the High Castle

I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that? And why one about the Germans and the Japanese losing the war? Why that particular story and no other one? What is there it can’t tell us directly, like it always has before? This must be different, don’t you think?”

Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately. He watched the Berlin houses pass. My own Volk, he thought; you and I, again together.

They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus

Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society. There have been, in Nazi Germany, tattered lists of names over which men have pored before.

Hopeless. Only cars and buses. Cars like brutal big crushers, all unfamiliar in shape. He avoided seeing them; kept his eyes straight ahead. Distortion of my optic perception of particularly sinister nature. A disturbance affecting my sense of space. Horizon twisted out of line. Like lethal astigmatism striking without warning

Mr. Tagomi thought, Spoiled. My chance at nirvana. Gone. Interrupted by that white barbarian Neanderthal yank. That subhuman supposing I worked a child’s puerile toy.
Rising from the bench he took a few steps unsteadily. Must calm down. Dreadful low-class jingoistic racist invectives, unworthy of me.

Yes, that is artist’s job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky

The oracle will cut through it. Even weird breed of cat like Nazi Germany comprehensible to I Ching

The jawless SD man’s eyes still contained life, of a kind. He still perceives me, Mr. Tagomi thought.

This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.