Philip K. Dick Quotes
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It sounds like they’re saying passive life is good, he thought. But there is no such thing as passive life. That’s a contradiction.
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The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
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He awoke-and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.
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No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.
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'Maybe I shouldn’t have told you-about it being electrical.' She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.'No,' Rick said. 'I’m glad to know. Or rather-' He became silent. 'I’d prefer to know.'
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This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.
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I did not attend the services, because it seems to me, as Pythagoras says, the body is the tomb of the soul and that by being born a person has already begun to die.
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It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.
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This hypnagogic condition. Attention-faculty diminished so that twilight state obtains; world seen merely in symbolic, archetypal aspect, totally confused with unconscious material.
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The Empire Never Ended
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One thing I've found that I can do that I really enjoy is rereading my own writing, earlier stories and novels especially. It induces mental time travel, the same way certain songs you hear on the radio do … the whole thing returns, an eerie feeling that I'm sure you've experienced.
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
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They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed-run over, maimed, destroyed-but they continued to play anyhow.
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'Hasn’t all this taught you anything?' Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum’s return and report.'Like what?''That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous-it’s the stuff of living.
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''Everything is true', he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'
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Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
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This one fact alone, Rachmael reflected, should have frightened the rational citizen. But-The people did not know. The media had not reported it.
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'There’s a law,' Chuck said, 'which I call Rittersdorf’s Third Law of Diminished Returns, which states that proportional to how long you hold a job you imagine that it has progressively less and less importance in the scheme of things.'
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I don't write beautifully - I just write reports about our condition.
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Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang.
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I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. My training was correct: I must not shrink from the clear white light, for if I do, I will once more re-enter the cycle of birth and death, never knowing freedom, never obtaining release. The veil of maya will fall once more.
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'You don't go by odds. You know what's coming. You've seen the cards already.' She studied his face intently. 'No, you can't be cold-decked. It wouldn't be possible.'
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Mental illness is not funny.
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We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.