Quotes from Philip K. Dick

Anyone that's fighting the Police is on our side.

Did you know that Ubik is true, and we're in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they're showing us endless funky films? And now and then reality breaks through, as in Ubik, from our friend who was here once and then died, but has turned back … he talked something about a new view of the Platonic forms, the archetypal forms. But he was unable to explain.

I get the idea Donna is a mercenary, he thought. Not on salary. And they are the most wraithlike. They disappear forever. New names, new locations. You ask yourself, where is she now? And the answer is— Nowhere. Because she was not there in the first place.

But it if was helping him, what would the criterion be? I mean, you know, if he only dreamed that he heard a voice telling him what to do, how to do it, this is a phantasm of his own mind. And yet, if the results are the same … It raises … Oddly enough, Paul, you'll be amazed to discover that I tend to want to treat the questionness of what is real.

Sentado en la biblioteca pública de Seattle, con todo el material de consulta a mi alrededor, llegué a la conclusión de que Lincoln era lo que hoy llamaríamos un psicótico maniaco-depresivo.

The thing that strikes me is that I've cut myself off a really different version of this, then, because I thought I had ended this problem. And it just came around from behind much worse, Because the way I was always phrasing it was in terms of a posteriori knowledge - that is, empirical knowledge, which is all sophisticated versions of, you kno, 'Is this chair real?' It's that sort of simplistic philosophical thing, it's sort of a kind of solipsism.

it woke him up and allowed his dreams, his nocturnal desires and random wishes, to condense into a semblance of rationality.

C'era un'espressione di grande amarezza sul suo viso. L'amarezza era come un solvente che avesse corroso le desolate piaghe della carne, scoprendo le ossa sottostanti

Ele se sentiu, de uma hora para outra, como uma mariposa inútil, agitando-se diante da vidraça da realidade, vendo-a de modo indistinto pelo lado de fora. - ubik

Men of thought, Anita said. Not men of action. It's begun to have a paralyzing effect.

O que ele não sabia na época era que às vezes uma reação adequada à realidade é enlouquecer.

That's why their lives are worse than ours; they can't give up and die - they have to go on.

In our time we maintain colonies on Mars, on Luna; we're perfecting workable interstellar flight—these people have not been able to cope with the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. This

Cómo te las arreglaste para desaparecer tan pronto? Un disfraz tan completo y efectivo es difícil de obtener - Con dinero se consigue todo -repuso Anderton evasivamente

There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past.

He was, perhaps like [the depressive] Dino Watters, addicted to gloom. She felt sorry for him if that were so. It was a terrible malady to have. Far worse than the several others.

So then when they rise and tend to be, the more quickly they grow that they may be, so much the more they haste not to he. —St. Augustine

We're being paid to sit here and do nothing. So we feel all upset. First we stand up, then we sit down. We blame it on the heat, but it's really because we don't know what to do with ourselves.

When he landed the police department hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building in Seattle, he found a young woman waiting for him. Black-haired and slender, wearing the new huge dust-filtering glasses, she approached his car, her hands deep in the pockets of her brightly striped long coat.

A myth can be picked up by a whole society, believed and taught to the next generation. Gods, fairies, witches—believing a thing doesn't make it true. For centuries, Terrans believed the Earth was flat.

By the way, the town where Asklepios' sanitarium existed, I read now, is up in the mountains. Probably the climate was and is cool and moist; I read it's heavily wooded. I bet the stars are quite visible there. It's the place I yearn for. Out of memory.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. - Roy Batty of Blade Runner

I'm not in the novel, I am the novel

Thinking this he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time.