The Dice Man Quotes
"Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen."
"The whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don't change corpses. Corpses aren't bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at."
"If you're not writing, you're not thinking, and if you're not thinking you're dead."
"Every man's personal proverb about himself is: 'Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.'"
"You take away all his habits, compulsions, and channeled drives, and you take away him."
"The same old new lands, the same old fornication, the same getting and spending, the same drugged, desperate, repetitious faces appearing in the office for analysis, the same effective, meaningless lobs."
"The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who's curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts."
"A human being, a human personality is the total pattern of the accumulated limitations and potentials of an individual."
"It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane."
"No. I've done something wrong, Arlene. And I don't want to lose Jake's friendship and trust just because I've raped you."
"But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor!"
"I won't tell you anything about myself except a few sensational superficialities."
"I'm like a professional psychiatrist, the very jockstrap of my basic self; I'm becoming belly to belly with whim."
"The secret of the successful dicelife is to be a puppet on the strings of the die."
"I would be too strong. Nothing could stop me."
"How proud I am of being the Dice Man! Whose primary purpose is supposedly to kill all sense of pride in self."
"The letting go was not very different from the insanities I had been committing while sober."
"Every time I followed the dictates of the die I was successfully building a house or purposely knocking one down."
"Men must be free from boundaries, patterns, and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel, and create in new ways."
"My goal was to destroy all sense of an audience; to become without values, evaluators, without desires: to be inhuman, all-inclusive."
"Seduction is the art of making normal, desirable, good and rewarding what had previously seemed abnormal, undesirable, evil, and unrewarding."
"Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason."
"Seldom have I felt less respect for the die's judgment."
"The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it to Divine Accident and Prankishness."
"We want to create a world of adult children without fear."
"We want freedom from individual identity. Freedom from security and stability and coherence."
"The great Goddam machine society has made us all into hamsters."
"We need disciplined anarchy, controlled letting go."
"We want a community of creators, a monastery for joy-filled madmen."
"The world needs dicepeople. The world shall have dicepeople."
"Could there exist a Totally Random Man? Could a single human so develop his capabilities that he might vary his soul from hour to hour at whim?"
"Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured."
"Life became like a series of bit parts in a bad movie, with no script, no director, and with actresses and actors who didn't know their lines or their roles."
"Perhaps I'm actually Hubert Humphrey dreaming I'm a bumblebee dreaming of being Dr. Rhinehart."
"The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed 'cures' by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century."
"The more someone tries to be honest and authentic, the more he's going to be blocked and inhibited."
"In our multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill."
"All thirty-one of our surviving dice students are completely maladjusted to the insane society. There is thus hope."
"Freud postulated that a neurotic will find outflow of money, excrement, time or energy a loss, a sullying of the soul."
"It is the tragedy inherent in the fate of man that he shit."
"The suffering our dice-dictated actions causes is clearly nothing as compared man for man to that caused by rational, civilized man."
"Blasphemy. God creates, experiments, rides the wind. He doesn't wallow in the accumulated feces of his past."
"You are all potentially chameleons of the spirit, and thus of all the illusions that rob men of their divinity this is the cruelest."
"It's variety and unpredictability we like in our friends."
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
"You should have told me about your dicelife before."
"Being honest and truthful the way we do here is like cheap striptease, a lot of motion to reveal that there are boobs and pricks and asses in the world, something we all knew in the first place."
"Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on which illusion I feel like supporting."
"The desire to manipulate your surrender to the Die so that you may gain from it is futile."
"There are two paths: you use the Die, or you let the Die use you."
"You can't find in me any piece of behavior which isn't the best."
"If I must sacrifice my son in thy Name, my son shall die: lesser Gods than Thee have demanded thus of their followers."
"He who thinks that he slays and he who thinks that he is slain; both of them fail to perceive the truth; no one slays, nor is one slain."
"Therefore, knowing him as such, thou shouldst not grieve and thy duty shouldst be performed. Pick up thy die, O Arjuna, and kill."
"I like you. I like you very much. Perhaps we could stay together a while."
"Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor these lords of men, nor will there ever be a time hereafter when we shall cease to be."
"I'm worried about my image. The Father of dice living has an obligation always to shake true."
"Create the options, shake the dice. I don't know why you keep talking."
"We never know what's good for us. Betrayal might be just what Eric's looking for."
"If you think you gotta help people, you're just another man."
"If you want anything, you're just another man."
"I'm worried. It's me that may get two hundred and thirty-seven years."