Philip K. Dick Quotes
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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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'A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning,' Joe said. 'And incapable of being proved one way or the other.'
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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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Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost...perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well.
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The Martians are always coming.
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Fish cannot carry guns.
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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.
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To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality.
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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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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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You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury.
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That was my problem then and it's my problem now; I have a bad attitude. In a nutshell, I fear authority but at the same time I resent it - the authority and my own fear - so I rebel. And writing SF is a way to rebel. … SF is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers and bad attitudes - an attitude of 'Why?' or 'How come?' or 'Who says?'
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When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.
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'Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.''It’s a lost art,' Hank said. 'Maybe there’s an instruction manual on it.'
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Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.
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'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said.'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed.'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-''Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I’ll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won’t puzzle him.
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Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane.
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Am I being paid back for something I did? He asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven’t I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?
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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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I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.
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The vidphone company let me off the hook.
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In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.
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I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's bad off, isn't it?
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I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'