Quotes About Existence

The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.

We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia.

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

Io sono vivo, voi siete morti

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.

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

The Empire Never Ended

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards, Dick wrote of these stories. In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.

Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not percieve.

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.

I think, Dr. Stone said, that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time.

The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.

You can't go from people to nonpeople.

Is it a loss?" Rachael repeated. "I don't really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive." She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, "I'm not alive!

every particle being connected with every other; you can't fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it's alive.

Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed.

There is no Pris," he said. "Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.

In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.

We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God.