Quotes from Philip K. Dick

Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other... now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.

La ce i-ar folosi unui om s? câÈ™tige întreaga lume dac? în schimb îÈ™i pierde sufletul?

Exactly what powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

They expected miracles, evidently, as if the Nazis could remold the world by magic. No, it was science and technology and that fabulous talent for hard work; the Germans never stopped applying themselves. And when they did a task, they did it right.

There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.

It was a brilliant idea and the only idea that could have worked. Up above, on the ruined, blasted surface of what had once been a living planet, the leady crawled and scurried, and fought Man's war. And undersurface, in the depths of the planet, human beings toiled endlessly to produce the weapons to continue the fight, month by month, year by year.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all.

And there in the next room by the sofa sat a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile. Barefoot, he padded into the living room, and seated himself by the suitcase; he opened it, clicked switches, and turned on Dr. Smile. Meters began to register and the mechanism hummed. Where am I? Barney asked it. And how far am I from New York? That was the main point...

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week.

You know that, Ted. It's the most precious thing we have. Loyalty between us, between protector and serf, between a man and his mistress. Maybe, Benteley said slowly, a person should be loyal to an ideal.

It's not just the drive. They're right out front. Everywhere. Waiting for me. All day and night." "Who are, dear?" "Robots selling things. As soon as I set down the ship. Robots and visual-audio ads. They dig right into a man's brain. They follow people around until they die.

If this place were closer to Terra there'd be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There'd be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.

is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.

The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. 'There's nobody here has anything to do with governments! We're all good people!

He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural. And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one's course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

He started toward the door, then halted briefly. To the two of them he said, 'Is the owl genuine?' Rachael glanced swiftly at the elder Rosen. 'He's leaving anyhow,' Eldon Rosen said. 'It doesn't matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls.

And what good was a political strategist who couldn't look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn't want his country to survive him.

Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society. There have been, in Nazi Germany

Frauds—the deceptions of madness—abound and mask themselves as their mirror opposite: pose as sanity. The masks, however, wear thin and the madness reveals itself. It is an ugly thing.

Religion, Sebastian thought wearily. More ins and outs, more angles, than ordinary commerce.

The gentle sounds of the choir singing "Amen, amen" are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.

One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded.

sometimes the best response to reality is to go insane

That's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself.