Quotes from Philip K. Dick

engineer finishes

So now we know the truth', Al said. 'Is it the truth?' Al said, 'Sure. Obviously.' 'What a hell of a way to learn it. From the wall of a men's room.' He felt bitter resentment rather than anything else. 'That's how graffiti is; harsh and direct.

All the Heebs asked was to be let alone; they simply did not want to be bothered by life, and each year they shed more and more of the complexities of living. Returned, Baines reflected, to the mere vegetable, which, to a Heeb, was ideal.

life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions.

Che cosa vede una camera? si chiese. Voglio dire, che cosa vede per davvero? E fin dove? Anche dentro la testa? Anche giù dentro il cuore?

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an indeterminable ennui.

You missed the vidcall this morning. Miss Wild told me; it came through the switchboard exactly at nine.

And when I gave my phone number the last two times I gave it wrong—another number. And to me the weirdest thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never heard of before. I'm afraid to call them; I don't know why.

In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy.

Isn't Walt Disney's head supposed to be on the fifty-cent piece? Sammy said. Either Disney's, Al said, or if it's an older one, then Fidel Castro's.

Without a woman we'd discuss racing cars and horses and tell dirty jokes; no civilization.

The mortal human only anticipates as a lower lifeform, the form to come....

Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It's a big business, I am told.

All those centuries, regarded as a pretty and comforting fable by the world's intellectuals, something to lull people into accepting their fate. The understanding that, as predicted, it would one day be literally true, that it was not a myth—

The difference between Gloria Knudson and Sherri was obvious; Gloria wanted to die for strictly imaginary reasons. Sherri would literally die whether she wanted to or not. Gloria had the option to cease playing her malignant death-game any time she psychologically wished, but Sherri did not.

manifestations of paranoia. We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

Loitering on Earth

he picked up his desk vidphone and said to Miss Marsten, "Get me the Happy Dog Pet Shop on Sutter Street.

Let people call me crazy; fuck them.

Camino a tu tumba, aún mantendrás la boca abierta para preguntar: ¿Qué es lo que he hecho?. Y serás enterrado así, con la boca abierta. Y nunca podré explicártelo, pensó Buckman. Sólo podré decirte una cosa: no llames jamás la atención de las autoridades. No nos intereses nunca. No hagas que deseemos saber cosas acerca de ti.

If he finds out I'm a chickenhead he won't talk to me; that's always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why?

He had very few dealings with the government. That was neither a virtue nor a vice; it was simply good luck.

Bright specks that were commute ships, little eggs that carried businessmen and white-collar workers around. The huge transport tubes that shot masses of workmen to factories and labor camps from their housing units.

However, just for the heck of it, he wiggled his bent Sidney's out of his coat pocket, thumbed to ostrich comma male-female, old-young, sick-well, mint-used, and inspected the prices.