Quotes About Identity

Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing. Ring-ring-ring.

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness.

It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don't think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.

And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that.

You stupid bastard, does what you're fighting for look so real now? Skin pigment. What a laugh! Why not eye color? Too bad nobody ever thought of that. It cuts it a little finer, but basically it's the same thing.

am an outsider in my own country.

Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.

Palmer Eldritch had gone to Prox a man and returned a god.

I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.

You know what I think? I think you've picked up the Nazi idea that Jews can't create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen.' He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink. 'Maybe so,' Frink said.

You cook the native foods to perfection, Robert Childan thought. What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller...you could paste together out of tin and rice paper a completely artificial America. Rice-paper Mom in the kitchen, rice-paper Dad reading the newspaper. Rice-paper put at his feet. Everything.

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.

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head I'm the one that's alive. You're all dead. Lean over the bowl and then take a dive All of you are dead. I am alive.

Philip K. Dick

There are people among us who are biologically human but who are androids in the metaphoric sense.

Si es amor por una mujer o una imitación androide, es sexo. Despierte y cuestióneselo, Deckard. Quería acostarse con un androide femenino, nada más y nada menos.

It looks," Lotze said, gazing down, "as if it was designed by a Jew.

I'm sorry, she thought. But she said nothing. I can't save you or anybody else from being dark. She thought of Frank. I wonder if he's dead yet. Said the wrong things; spoke out of line. No, she thought. Somehow he likes Japs. Maybe he identifies with them because they're ugly. She had always told Frank that he was ugly. Large pores. Big nose. Her own skin was finely knit, unusually so. Did he fall dead without me? A fink is a finch, a form of bird. And they say birds die.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly?

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

They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies, views and drives—and its own eye from which to view the outside universe.

If I die,' she murmured, 'maybe I'll be born again when the Rosen Association stamps out its next unit of my subtype.

Do androids dream?

Mercer doesn't have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn't required to violate his own identity.