Quotes from Philip K. Dick

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.

I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.

You learn to get by from day to day, Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.

Dio promette la vita eterna" disse Eldritch. "Io posso fare di meglio; posso metterla in commercio.

There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters

You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you. I know, Benteley agreed. I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?

Sometimes I dream-- I'll put that on your gravestone.

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. But no longer.

I like commas.

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. You have to let me in, he says. I wrote Parsifal . It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right? And they answer, Well, we read it and it makes no sense. SLAM .

Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know.

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?

An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for. "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android.

In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.

He started keeping a journal — had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

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

Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won't make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad. A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present.

But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

In this particular lifestyle the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

The door refused to open. It said, Five cents, please.