It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus.

It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.