Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I 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. Dick

202. “We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?” He inspected Mr. Baynes’ face for his reaction.”

— Philip K. Dick

203. “Does this cure your depression?” he asked her. “It cures mine.” Iran said, “It certainly does cure my depression. Now we can admit to everybody that the sheep’s false.” “No need to do that,” he said cautiously. “But we can,” Iran persisted. “See, now we have nothing to hide; what we’ve always wanted has come true. It’s a dream!”

— Philip K. Dick

204. “He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article.”

— Philip K. Dick

205. “Yet, the dark fire waned: the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism – with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it – could never have reconciled itself to.”

— Philip K. Dick

206. “Maybe I’ll just sit here parked for a while, he decided, and alpha meditate or go into various different altered states of consciousness.”

— Philip K. Dick

207. “How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.”

— Philip K. Dick

208. “Wake up to a hearty, lip-smacking bowlful of nutritious, nourishing Ubik toasted flakes, the adult cereal that’s more crunchy, more tasty, more ummmish. Ubik breakfast cereal, the whole-bowl taste treat!”

— Philip K. Dick

209. “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.”

— Philip K. Dick

210. “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.”

— Philip K. Dick

211. “I remember something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: ‘For a penny,’ the Buddha said, ‘I can board a ferry and do that.’ It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.”

— Philip K. Dick

212. “My father told me what it used to feel like, waiting in the dentist’s office. Every time the nurse opened the door you thought, It’s happening. The thing I’ve been afraid of all my life.”

— Philip K. Dick

213. “Italy being a traitor?” His voice grated. “The Duce – he was a clown; we all know that.”

— Philip K. Dick

214. “Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.”

— Philip K. Dick

215. “My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’”

— Philip K. Dick

216. “It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.”

— Philip K. Dick

217. “Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.”

— Philip K. Dick

218. “The man contains – not the boy – but earlier men.”

— Philip K. Dick

219. “Ruth said, “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is”-she paused, reflecting-“like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and denying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

— Philip K. Dick

220. “The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?”

— Philip K. Dick

221. “Only death can get us out of this and maybe not even death. Maybe it’s too late; we’ll carry this deterioration with us to the next life.”

— Philip K. Dick

222. “You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery?” Zina hesitated. “It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology;.”

— Philip K. Dick

223. “Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A – there was something about that which absolutely fascinated me.”

— Philip K. Dick

224. “If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.”

— Philip K. Dick

225. “Isn’t a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?”

— Philip K. Dick

226. “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.”

— Philip K. Dick

227. “Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.”

— Philip K. Dick

228. “Dr Stone wasn’t insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.”

— Philip K. Dick

229. “When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. Now I must seek in other realms.”

— Philip K. Dick

230. “Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”

— Philip K. Dick

231. “Is it a loss?” Rachael repeated. “I don’t really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We’re not born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that’s what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren’t really alive.” She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, “I’m not alive!”

— Philip K. Dick

232. “The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths.”

— Philip K. Dick

233. “If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho... even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.”

— Philip K. Dick

234. “Nothing could be more impolite. To say, “Is your sheep genuine?” would be a worse breach of manners.”

— Philip K. Dick

235. “We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.”

— Philip K. Dick

236. “But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”

— Philip K. Dick

237. “The door, meagerly, opened and he saw within the apartment a fragmented and misaligned shrinking figure, a girl who cringed and slunk away and yet held onto the door, as if for physical support. Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her and then, with malice, patched her together badly.”

— Philip K. Dick

238. “Life is short, he thought. 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. Taking the small box, he put the Edfrank jewellery piece away in his coat pocket.”

— Philip K. Dick

239. “Law of economy: nothing is waste. Even the unreal. What a sublimity in the process.”

— Philip K. Dick

240. “Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.”

— Philip K. Dick

241. “It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” – language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality.”

— Philip K. Dick

242. “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

243. “I’ve been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it’s just not coming again.”

— Philip K. Dick

244. “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 percieve.”

— Philip K. Dick

245. “What is the space which this speaks of? Vertical ascent. To heaven. Of time? Into the light-world of the mutable. Yes, this thing has disgorged its spirit: light. And my attention is fixed; I can’t look away. Spellbound by mesmerizing shimmering surface which I can no longer control. No longer free to dismiss.”

— Philip K. Dick

246. “It’s all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it’s ersatz as the day is long.”

— Philip K. Dick

247. “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.”

— Philip K. Dick

248. “The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.”

— Philip K. Dick

249. “It is their sense of space and time. 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 in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick.”

— Philip K. Dick

250. “Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself finally.”

— Philip K. Dick