Philip K. Dick Quotes
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For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
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That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
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Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.
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Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.
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An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.
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He glared at her. Women can get a man to do anything, he realized. Mother, wife, even employee; they twist us like hot little bits of thermoplastic.
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Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick.
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I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both.
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It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
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If I had known it was harmlessI would have killed it myself.
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'Isn’t there any way-' He broke off. Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone, and I might as well get out of here.
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Spinoza saw... that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, 'I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second.'
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'Time to get up,' he informed her. 'Don’t you hear the Almighty bellowing in the living room?''What’s he saying?' Marsha murmured crossly.'Nothing in particular. Repent or suffer eternal damnation. The usual tribal tub-thumping.'
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So that’s that, Barney said to himself. I violated Rule One of career-oriented functioning: never tell your superior something he doesn’t want to hear.
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It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you.
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The Martians are always coming.
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A psychologist said, 'They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn’t real, but that it’s reversed.'
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Ramp hawkers were peddling 'methods,' low priced sure-fire theories guaranteed to predict bottle twitches and beat the whole Minimax game. The hawkers were ignored by the hurrying throngs of people; anybody with a genuine system of prediction would be using it, not selling it.
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'A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning,' Joe said. 'And incapable of being proved one way or the other.'
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You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.
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Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had...but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt.
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My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I've written about fascism and my fear of it.
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'Cats have no souls,' Hamilton said morbidly, watching his tomcat avidly feed. 'The most majestic cat in the universe would balance a carrot on his head for a bite of pork liver.'
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That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.