Quotes from Philip K. Dick

He didn't just know there would be personal computers. He knew they would crash, that the people who came to fix them would charge heavily by the hour, and be annoying, and no good, and in the end would just tell you to buy a new and more expensive machine –

You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I'm dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.

This guy—Joe whatever—hasn't even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. Yes, that's how they are. They're not idealists like Joe and me; they're cynics with utter faith.

We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.

It's a dream, Pris said. Induced by drugs that Roy gave me. P-pardon? You really think that bounty hunters exist? Mr. Baty said they killed your friends. Roy Baty is as crazy as I am, Pris said. Our trip was between a mental hospital on the East Coast and here. We're all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives — flattening of affect, it's called. And we have group hallucinations.

I used to condemn junkies, like they could get off the stuff if they really wanted to, and that is just as stupid as saying, You could grow eyes in the back of your head if you really wanted to.

verisimilitude.

There wasn't a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else.

It strikes me as an interesting paradox that a Buddha-an enlightened one-would be unable to figure it out, even after four-and-a-half years, that he had become enlightened. Fat had become totally bogged down in his enormous exegesis, trying futilely to determine what had happened to him. He resembled more a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.

While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish only.

the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It's fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear; much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.

El tiempo, ay, daba prisa a los hombres.

This can't be normal death…[this] is unnatural.

There are celebrated literary lions who've won Pulitzers and Booker prizes for ideas that Dick would toss aside in an early chapter, but … oh, what's the use. You evidently already know the score, because you're reading this.

The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn't say. In Horselover Fat's case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late.

As far as I'm concerned, the girl said, you can count that as a major objection to Mercerism. Her voice was clean and neutral; she intended only to state a fact, he realized. I guess I'll go back upstairs, he said

Mercerism is a swindle.' The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.

Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand.

God, what a dreadful thing - the truth.

We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.

Fat, pondering and writing and doing research and receiving dribs and drabs of messages from Zebra during hypnagogic states and in dreams, and attempting to salvage something from the wreck of his life, had decided to go in search of the Savior. He would find him wherever he was.

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

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

I will be at loose ends without a countryman to talk to." "I'm not a countryman of yours," Baynes said. "Oh, yes; that's so. But racially, you're quite close. For all intents and purposes the same.