Philip K. Dick Quotes Page 2

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”

“You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople.”

“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 made it up.”

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so.

It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally, the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him – a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”

“To live is to be haunted.”

“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”

“How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.”

“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.”

“They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off.

It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

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

“We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.”

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”

“No single thing abides; and all things are f*cked up.”

“So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.”

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

“Fish cannot carry guns.”

“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis', or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

“The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.”

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. ”

“There exists, for everyone, a sentence – a series of words – that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”

“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.”

“This is a mournful discovery.

1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.”

“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”