Philip K. Dick

"The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down."

"Don't you feel ashamed when you let a machine tell you what to do?"

"In the presence of the computer, he found himself becoming stupid."

"What does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it? It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness...Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans...Their view; it is cosmic...They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles of space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again."

"When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific."

"(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man."

"Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane."

"Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great."

"It's the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, 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. I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that."

"Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined...or one great figure...or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it."

"Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren't watching what they do then what they do isn't real."

"This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained."

"Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer."

"Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?"

"To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality."

"We have entered a Moment when we are alone. We cannot get assistance, as before. Well, Mr. Tagomi thought, perhaps that too is good. Or can be made good. One must still try to find the Way."

"That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky."

"I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. My training was correct: I must not shrink from the clear white light, for if I do, I will once more re-enter the cycle of birth and death, never knowing freedom, never obtaining release. The veil of maya will fall once more."

"This hypnagogic condition. Attention-faculty diminished so that twilight state obtains; world seen merely in symbolic, archetypal aspect, totally confused with unconscious material."

"I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both."

"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 perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical — I believe it."

"We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious."

"(Hawthorne Abendsen) told us about our own world. This, what's around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment."

"You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to."

"[Fiction] Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface."

"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 interminable ennui."

"Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure."

"There is evil! It's actual, like cement."

"“There’s a law,” Chuck said, “which I call Rittersdorf’s Third Law of Diminished Returns, which states that proportional to how long you hold a job you imagine that it has progressively less and less importance in the scheme of things.”"

"“How come you didn’t recognize me?” Hentman said crossly. “Aren’t I world-famous? Or maybe you don’t watch TV.”"

"Here, the enemy was not merely another group of human beings with a differing political persuasion; the enemy here was death."

"But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people's theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense."

"Hands in his pockets he began to walk aimlessly down the sidewalk runnel. And, each minute, feeling more and more scared and desperate. Everything was falling apart around him. And he seemed helpless to halt the collapse; he could only witness it, completely impotent, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand."

"You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury."

"“Hasn’t all this taught you anything?” Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum's return and report. “Like what?” “That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living."

"Insanity — to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others."

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

"So that’s that, Barney said to himself. I violated Rule One of career-oriented functioning: never tell your superior something he doesn’t want to hear."

"“God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.”"

"You’re not just out of your body; you’re out of your mind, too."

"Can any of us fix anything? No. None of us can do that. We're specialized. Each one of us has his own line, his own work. I understand my work, you understand yours. The tendency in evolution is toward greater and greater specialization. Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it. Continued complexity makes it impossible for us to know anything outside our own personal field — I can't follow the work of the man sitting at the next desk over from me. Too much knowledge has piled up in each field. And there are too many fields."