Quotes from Philip K. Dick

To quote a Western saint familiar to all: 'What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?

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.

I couldn't do that. How can you live like that? You've got to have people you can depend on, somebody strong, somebody to take care of you. This is a big frigid world, completely bleak and hostile and empty of warmth. You know what happens to you if you let go and fall?

Primero habían muerto los búhos. Eso hacía parecido entonces divertido: esas aves gruesas, plumosas, blancas, caídas en los parques y en las calles...

One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.

Of course, the way they put it, the idea was if we had to buy our gas masks and bomb shelters we'd take better care of them. As if we ever damaged telephones and sidewalks. Or highways, because the whole state provided them. Or armies.

Going to the closet—it was the ancient-style manual variety—he hung up his coat.

A dream woke me, Arctor said. A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and God appeared and His voice rumbled at me-what the hell did He say?-oh yeah. 'I am vexed with you, my son' He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, 'What'd I do now, Lord?' And He said, 'You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.' And then I realized it was my ex-wife.

If you intend to kill yourself you don't require a reason, in the usual sense of the term; just as, to contrary, when you intend to stay alive, no verbal, articulated, formal reason is necessary, one you can seize on if the issue comes up.

10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, That which is above is that which is below. By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

His thoughts, Helio said, are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him. We are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land. At that Arnie laughed loud and long. Truth always amuses the ignorant, Helio said.

We made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it's changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople.

Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.

the massively built old man was tired, despite his customary show of energy. I guess when you get up into that bracket, Herbert decided, you have to act in a certain way; you have to appear more than a human with merely ordinary failings.

That's really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?

It was hell living in the twenty-first century. Information transfer had reached the velocity of light.

We and our environments form such interconnected cluster systems that mutually process information and alter it while exchanging it; we are all (humans) like a vast compound eye which shows a repetition of the motion of a single object but each cell reflecting slightly differently. (p.155)

To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn't have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal.

I don't believe in God," Kevin said. "I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn't do." "Are you kidding me?" "No," Kevin said. "Where did the Great Punta come from?" "Only the Great Punta knows.

When something begins to devour the world, a serious matter is taking place. If the devouring entity is evil or insane, the situation is not merely serious; it is grim. But Fat viewed the process the other way around. He viewed it exactly as Plato had viewed it in his own cosmology: the rational mind (noös) persuades the irrational (chance, blind determinism, ananke), into cosmos.

a noncol. A useless misfit, an outsider. A loner lacking college degrees.

Llegué a la conclusión de que no había tenido conciencia (...), que sólo sabía que cuando regresara a casa (...) habría cambios importantes que él mismo se encargaría de provocar. Y dichos cambios afectarían a toda criatura viviente de la casa. Mató a los animales para demostrar que lo que hacía era importante. Que era capaz de hacer algo irreparable.

You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.