Quotes About Perception

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell, Elias said. We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.

We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and time creations of our own psyche and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear. Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.

You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

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

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

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

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.

The Empire Never Ended

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

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.

Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here.' He tapped his head. 'In the mind, not the gun.

Am I the only one who knows? I'll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me - they just imagine they do.

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.

Her smile increased. She had perfect white regular teeth; Irish, Juliana decided. Only Irish blood could give that jawline such femininity.

This guy—Joe whatever—hasn't even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.

Consciousness of unconsciousness

A person's authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.

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.

A Gresham's Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real.