Philip K. Dick Quotes
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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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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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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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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
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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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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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This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.
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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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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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'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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'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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''Everything is true', he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'
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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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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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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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'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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You saw something you were not supposed to see - something few elements have been aware of, let alone witnessed.
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I don't write beautifully - I just write reports about our condition.
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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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'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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I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.
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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.