Philip K. Dick Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

Cris didn't play fair. He had watched half an hour — then come out and thrown once. One perfect toss, one dead ringer.

Philip K. Dick
Am I being paid back for something I did? He asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven't I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?

Philip K. Dick
She did not really want to know; she believed she understood already.

Philip K. Dick
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

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

Philip K. Dick
The mystery, he thought, the explanation, he means. Of a secret. A sacred secret. We shall not die. The reflexions shall leave. And it will happen fast. We shall all be changed, and by that he means reversed back, suddenly. In the twinkling of an eye. Because we are fucking backward right now, I guess, every one of us, everyone and every damn thing, and distance, and even time. But how long, he thought, when a print is being made, a contact print, when the photographer discovers he's got the negative reversed, how long does it take to flip it? To reverse it again so it's like it's supposed to be? A fraction of a second.

Philip K. Dick
A psychologist said, They used to talk about seeing only 'reflections' of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn't real, but that it's reversed.

Philip K. Dick
Time to get up, he informed her. Don't you hear the Almighty bellowing in the living room?
What's he saying? Marsha murmured crossly.
Nothing in particular. Repent or suffer eternal damnation. The usual tribal tub-thumping.

Philip K. Dick
"His brain pattern has been fully scanned. But it takes time for them to plot it out. We're all running around like lunatics while he just sits there!" Wisdom poked a stubby finger at the window. "We caught him easily enough. He can't have much, can he? But I'd like to know what it is. Before we euth him."
"Maybe we should keep him alive until we know."
"Euth in forty-eight hours," Wisdom repeated stubbornly. "Whether we know or not. I don't like him. He gives me the creeps."

Philip K. Dick
"You are certain you can keep the truth from her?"
"Sure," Ed said confidently. "I know I can."
"All right." The Old Man nodded slowly. "I will send you back. But you must tell no one." He swelled visibly. "Remember: you will eventually come back to me — everyone does, in the end — and your fate will not be enviable."

Philip K. Dick
Skill is a function of chance. It's an intuitive best-use of chance situations.

Philip K. Dick
Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

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.

Philip K. Dick
Fully absorbed in the peculiar text he had become totally oblivious to the noises and movements around him; all that existed for him now was the printed page held motionless before his intense scrutiny.

Philip K. Dick
It's a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, What was it like to see the first automobile? Shit, man, I was born in 1962.

Philip K. Dick
Life 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
He could not endure what he found himself going through, and he could not get away. It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custom-made unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her — and everyone else — together. In a knot which could never be undone, so long as they lived.
No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.

Philip K. Dick
You 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. Dick
The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.

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

Philip K. Dick
I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.

Philip K. Dick
I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

Philip K. Dick
People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!"

Philip K. Dick
Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?

Philip K. Dick
A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning, Joe said. And incapable of being proved one way or the other.

Philip K. Dick
Helping people was one of the two basic things Fat had been told to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channelled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.

Philip K. Dick
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.

Philip K. Dick
I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.

Philip K. Dick
Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.

Philip K. Dick
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.

Philip K. Dick