Philip K. Dick Quotes

You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.

I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.

I'm a strange person. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm going to do or say next. Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself. Sometimes what I do surprises me and I can't understand why I do it.

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.

The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it.

My father told me what it used to feel like, waiting in the dentist's office. Every time the nurse opened the door you thought, It's happening. The thing I've been afraid of all my life.

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

He now set down all the communications apparatus, rose stiffly from the chair and momentarily stood facing the misty, immobile, icebound shape of Joe Chip resting within its transparent plastic casket. Upright and silent, as it would be for the rest of eternity.

"Ruth said, "Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"-she paused, reflecting-"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.

"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."

There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters

It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

I feel the hot winds of karma driving me.

For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy them.