Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981)

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It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Philip K. Dick
Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't … Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

Philip K. Dick
Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

Philip K. Dick
God can be good and terrible-not in succession-but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

Philip K. Dick
Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.

Philip K. Dick
No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

Philip K. Dick
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.

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
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
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 cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Philip K. Dick
He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

Philip K. Dick
We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

Philip K. Dick
"You of all people," the void communicated. "Out of everyone, it is you I love the most."

Philip K. Dick
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

Philip K. Dick
A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

Philip K. Dick
This is a mournful discovery. 1)Those who agree with you are insane 2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

Philip K. Dick
For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him … another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.

Philip K. Dick
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.

Philip K. Dick
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

Philip K. Dick
So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

Philip K. Dick
The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.

Philip K. Dick
Amazed, Fat said, "She's decomposing and yet she's still giving birth?" "Only to monsters," Dr. Stone said.

Philip K. Dick
Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

Philip K. Dick
God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn't give a shit.

Philip K. Dick
Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.

Philip K. Dick
It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

Philip K. Dick
Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.

Philip K. Dick
We are not individuals. We are stations in a single Mind.

Philip K. Dick