Quotes from Philip K. Dick

Ruth said, Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is-she paused, reflecting-like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and denying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.

Love is another name for sex.

Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.

No one can win against kipple, he said, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia.

The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet. They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes.

Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.

in Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space.

Cancer... the process of creation gone wild, I thought.

Io sono vivo, voi siete morti

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. . . .

Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.

Send that, he told her. Sign it, et cetera. Work the sentences, if you wish, so that they will mean something. As she started from the office he added, Or so that they mean nothing. Whichever you prefer.

Damn her he said to himself. What good does it do my risking my life? She doesn't care whether we own an ostrich or not. Nothing penetrates.

And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It's fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear: much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.

One of these days, Joe said wrathfully, people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a postcred readily available or not.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

I am warm on the outside, what people see. Warm eyes, warm face, warm fucking fake smile, but inside I am cold all the time, and full of lies. I am not what I seem to be; I am awful.

Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent:

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.

Amazed, Fat said, She's decomposing and yet she's still giving birth? Only to monsters, Dr. Stone said.

The Empire Never Ended

David Hume, the great­est skep­tic of them all, once remarked that after a gath­er­ing of skep­tics met to pro­claim the verac­i­ty of skep­ti­cism as a phi­los­o­phy, all of the mem­bers of the gath­er­ing nonethe­less left by the door rather than the win­dow. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philoso­phers weren't tak­ing what they said seri­ous­ly.

Perché non rilassarsi un po'? Magari una passeggiata in macchina fino al Golden Gate Park, con lo zoo e i pesci? Fare una visita dove le cose che non possono pensare provano comunque gioia.