Philip K. Dick Quotes

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

~ Philip K. Dick

To live is to be haunted.

~ Philip K. Dick

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

~ Philip K. Dick

No single thing abides, and all things are fucked up.

~ Philip K. Dick

This is a mournful discovery.1)Those who agree with you are insane2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

~ Philip K. Dick

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.

~ Philip K. Dick

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

~ Philip K. Dick

Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

~ Philip K. Dick

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.

~ Philip K. Dick

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.

~ Philip K. Dick

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.

~ Philip K. Dick

Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.

~ Philip K. Dick

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed, you should try not to hear them.

~ Philip K. Dick

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

~ Philip K. Dick

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

~ Philip K. Dick

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

~ Philip K. Dick

What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring?What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?

~ Philip K. Dick

Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back.

~ Philip K. Dick

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

~ Philip K. Dick

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

~ Philip K. Dick

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

~ Philip K. Dick

I'm not much but I'm all I have.

~ Philip K. Dick

Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.

~ Philip K. Dick

Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.

~ Philip K. Dick

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

~ Philip K. Dick

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

~ Philip K. Dick

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

~ Philip K. Dick

A law of survival, Ragle had said. Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish . . . version of a timeless rule.

~ Philip K. Dick

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

~ Philip K. Dick

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.

~ Philip K. Dick

The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.

~ Philip K. Dick

There were many human groups that did not go to war; the Eskimos never grasped the idea at all, and the American Indians never took to it well. But these dissenters were wiped out, and a cultural pattern was established that became the standard for the whole planet. Now it has become ingrained in us.

~ Philip K. Dick

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

~ Philip K. Dick

And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.

~ Philip K. Dick

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

~ Philip K. Dick

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

~ Philip K. Dick

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

~ Philip K. Dick

In his article, Bogen concluded: “I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western Man. . . .

~ Philip K. Dick

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

~ Philip K. Dick

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

~ Philip K. Dick