The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.
Philip K. DickIt did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. 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. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class wind-up toy.
Philip K. DickAny system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie.
Philip K. DickEmpathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
Philip K. DickI think great art should play a part in the ordinary man's life, don't you? It can make his existence so much richer and more meaningful.
Philip K. DickMaybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.
Philip K. DickI mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?
Philip K. DickThere was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.
Philip K. DickThe person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.
Philip K. DickThe true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.
Philip K. DickWe are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.
Philip K. DickHe sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts.
Philip K. DickIf the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.
Philip K. DickI never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
Philip K. DickInsanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.
Philip K. DickFear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.
Philip K. DickWhen he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-- as near as I can figure out, God is dead." Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick.
Philip K. DickHe started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.
Philip K. DickYou know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer." "Did he show you slides?" We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Philip K. DickHe felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
Philip K. DickLife is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like [a] concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.
Philip K. DickWell, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.
Philip K. DickWhom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.
Philip K. DickIn one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .
Philip K. DickThe inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.
Philip K. Dick…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.
Philip K. Dick...the essence of the evil government is that it anticipates bad conduct on the part of its citizens. Any government which assumes that the population is going to do something evil has already lost its franchise to govern.
Philip K. DickGiving me a a new idea is like handing a cretin a gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang bang.
Philip K. DickSometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom.
Philip K. DickAre we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?
Philip K. DickLife in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.
Philip K. Dick