Quotes from Philip K. Dick

Fish cannot carry guns.

Emigrate or Degenerate.

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.

Mors certa, vita incerta

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man .

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up.

Just tell me why; why the fucking why? To which the universe would hollowly respond, My ways cannot be known, oh man. Which is to say, My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.

Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense

I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.

How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.

I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.

There is evil! It's actual, like cement. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.