Philip K. Dick Quotes

In all possible universes, Monday was the same.

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.

If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.

People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!"

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

The greatest menace that faces the human being in the 20th century is the coming into existence in our times of the totalitarian state, which can take many forms.

People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. the research, of course fails.

"The termination of a relationship," he said, "is not a misunderstanding. It's a reorganization of life."

I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.

The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.

"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."

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that — as if that weren't enough — but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.