Top 100 Philip K. Dick Quotes
#3. Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.
Philip K. Dick
#4. There's nothing worse than a perceptive universe if there's something weird about you.
Philip K. Dick
#6. Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.
Philip K. Dick
#7. She's so - well, maybe she is a witch. I mean, maybe that's what witches were ... old women with strange talents. Like her - being able to pass through time.
Philip K. Dick
#8. Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.'
'Will you be all right?'
'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.
Philip K. Dick
#9. A paranoiac, my friend, is a person who has gone crazy in the most intelligent, well-informed way, the world being what it is. The paranoiac believes that great secret conspiracies are afoot to destroy him.
Philip K. Dick
#10. I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.
Philip K. Dick
#11. Don't never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.
Philip K. Dick
#12. You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before
" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
Philip K. Dick
#13. The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.
Philip K. Dick
#14. To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette, excellent Land-O-Smiles brand. In
Philip K. Dick
#15. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting - do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect.
Philip K. Dick
#16. The door refused to open. It said, Five cents, please.
Philip K. Dick
#17. Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
Philip K. Dick
#18. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The
Philip K. Dick
#19. A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.
Philip K. Dick
#21. But change's always harsh on the loser. Nothing new.
Philip K. Dick
#22. I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E.
van Vogt.
Philip K. Dick
#24. You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer."
"Did he show you slides?"
We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Philip K. Dick
#25. The end times were not the end times after all. The end times were always coming but never here, always nearby and influencing us but never realized.
Philip K. Dick
#27. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they'd meditated on how to ball her, and remained.
Philip K. Dick
#29. I understand fine," Kevin said bitterly. "I just think it's fucked. God is either powerless, or stupid or he doesn't give a shit. Or all three. He's evil, dumb and weak. I think I'll start my own Exegesis.
Philip K. Dick
#31. If I'm an andy," Phil Resch said, "and you kill me, you can have my squirrel. Here; I'll write it out, willing it to you.
Philip K. Dick
#32. The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.
Philip K. Dick
#34. Plastics. Polyesters. Resins. Ersatz - industrial uses. Do you see? No consumers' commodities.
Philip K. Dick
#35. Insane people
psychologically defined, not legally define
are not in touch with reality.
Philip K. Dick
#36. Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
Philip K. Dick
#37. No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn't become a crocodile.
Philip K. Dick
#38. It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.
Philip K. Dick
#39. What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?
Philip K. Dick
#40. The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
Philip K. Dick
#41. Caroline said, "She's terribly, terribly disruptive." "So is reality," Hawthorne said.
Philip K. Dick
#42. Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment - the present - has little meaning, if any.
Philip K. Dick
#43. Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?
Philip K. Dick
#44. We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
Philip K. Dick
#45. Okay? You'll be a knockout. Listen, we'll buy a bottle of high-price Scotch and take it along. That Vat 69.' Frank,
Philip K. Dick
#46. Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy ... fear makes you always, always hold something back.
Philip K. Dick
#48. It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
Philip K. Dick
#49. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.
Philip K. Dick
#51. We're blind moles. Creeping through the soil, feeling with our snoots. We know nothing. I perceived this . . . now I don't know where to go. Screech with fear, only. Run away.
Philip K. Dick
#53. Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.
Philip K. Dick
#55. I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.
Philip K. Dick
#58. I don't have time to read popular fiction. I'm too busy with work.' Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they're afraid of. But of course really crave.
Philip K. Dick
#59. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.
Philip K. Dick
#60. There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.
Philip K. Dick
#61. Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.
Philip K. Dick
#62. My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.
Philip K. Dick
#63. The massively built old man was tired, despite his customary show of energy. I guess when you get up into that bracket, Herbert decided, you have to act in a certain way; you have to appear more than a human with merely ordinary failings.
Philip K. Dick
#64. How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?
Philip K. Dick
#65. All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind
Philip K. Dick
#66. If this place were closer to Terra there'd be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There'd be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.
Philip K. Dick
#67. People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.
Philip K. Dick
#68. 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.
Philip K. Dick
#69. The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk.
Philip K. Dick
#70. Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I'm the one that's alive. You're all dead.
Philip K. Dick
#71. Every particle being connected with every other; you can't fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.
Philip K. Dick
#72. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake
realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into
forgeries of themselves.
Philip K. Dick
#73. But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.
Philip K. Dick
#74. The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
Philip K. Dick
#75. Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now cuts my loins forever. Punishment. Married to a Jew and shacking up with a German assassin. She felt tears again in her eyes, boiling. For all I have committed. Wrecked. 'Let's go,' she said, rising to her feet. 'The hairdresser.
Philip K. Dick
#76. Watching him, Juliana thought, It's idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.
Philip K. Dick
#77. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.
Philip K. Dick
#78. I am warm on the outside, what people see. Warm eyes, warm face, warm fucking fake smile, but inside I am cold all the time, and full of lies. I am not what I seem to be; I am awful.
Philip K. Dick
#79. The universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment.
Philip K. Dick
#81. In Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space.
Philip K. Dick
#83. How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just - change.
With nothing causing it.
Philip K. Dick
#84. Make it?" Fred echoed. "Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your turns. The Latin for 'make' is facere, which also reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for 'to fuck', and I haven't ...
Philip K. Dick
#85. She sighed. "Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That's what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.
Philip K. Dick
#86. No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.
Philip K. Dick
#87. 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.
Philip K. Dick
#88. What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever.
Philip K. Dick
#89. You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you."
"I know," Benteley agreed. "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 pretty bad off, isn't it?
Philip K. Dick
#90. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
Philip K. Dick
#91. This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.
Philip K. Dick
#92. Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. "What is that?" he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. "Awful, ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.
Philip K. Dick
#93. Dreadful low-class jingoistic racist invectives, unworthy of me.
Philip K. Dick
#94. Dr Stone wasn't insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.
Philip K. Dick
#95. You learn to get by from day to day," Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. "You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.
Philip K. Dick
#96. The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.
Philip K. Dick
#97. Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?
Philip K. Dick
#98. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and time creations of our own psyche and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear.
Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.
Philip K. Dick
#99. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.
Philip K. Dick
#100. We cannot enter the monstrous schizophrenic morass of Nazi internecine intrigue; our minds cannot adapt.
Philip K. Dick
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