Philip K. Dick Quotes

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts.

"The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path," Charles Freck said, "is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there."

"Your spleen next," Barris said.

"They what, they cut — What does that do, a spleen?"

"Helps you digest your food."

"How?"

"By removing the cellulose from it."

"Then I guess after that — "

"Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa."

"How long can you live that way?"

Barris said, "It depends on your attitude."

"How many spleens does the average person have?" He knew there usually were two kidneys.

"Depends on his weight and age."

"Why?" Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.

"A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he's eighty — "

"You're shitting me."

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.

"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."

Isn't a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?

No one can win against kipple,’ he said, ‘except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kipple-ization.

In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them.

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea—if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.

In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record so they'll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.