Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us.”

— Philip K. Dick

352. “After her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. “Some other time,” the girl said, and moved back toward her apartment door.”

— Philip K. Dick

353. “In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannot fathom it. We evidently lack the work for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world.”

— Philip K. Dick

354. “It does not have wabi,” Paul said, “nor could it ever. But – ” He touched the pin with his nail. “Robert, this object has wu.”

— Philip K. Dick

355. “The fat, middle-aged landlady in her Venusian whistle-cricket hide dress and wubfur slippers repelled him; already this had become a grim experience.”

— Philip K. Dick

356. “This man is different. He can fix anything, do anything. He doesn’t work with knowledge, with science – the classified accumulation of facts. He knows nothing. It’s not in his head, a form of learning. He works by intuition – his power is in his hands, not his head. Jack-of-all-trades. His hands! Like a painter, an artist. In his hands – and he cuts across our lives like a knife-blade.”

— Philip K. Dick

357. “The human being has an unfortunate tendency to wish to please.”

— Philip K. Dick

358. “Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.”

— Philip K. Dick

359. “I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.”

— Philip K. Dick

360. “This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And.”

— Philip K. Dick

361. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

— Philip K. Dick

362. “Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this.”

— Philip K. Dick

363. “Thomas,” Fat told me, “is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality.” He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other personality in his head!”

— Philip K. Dick

364. “It’s easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.”

— Philip K. Dick

365. “It’s not what happened but how it is told.”

— Philip K. Dick

366. “The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level – call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material.”

— Philip K. Dick

367. “Consciousness of unconsciousness.”

— Philip K. Dick

368. “It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned “talk-tapes” in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegan’s Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”

— Philip K. Dick

369. “And after all, they had been successful with the Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students.”

— Philip K. Dick

370. “If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we’ve done in our lifetime – we’d drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren’t made to understand what they do.”

— Philip K. Dick

371. “Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.”

— Philip K. Dick

372. “It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.”

— Philip K. Dick

373. “He awoke – and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely. “Are.”

— Philip K. Dick

374. “You will manually feel this object with your left hand,” he said to himself, “and at the same time you will look at it with your right. And then in your own words you will tell us – ” He could not think out any more nonsense. Not without their help.”

— Philip K. Dick

375. “Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren’t watching what they do then what they do isn’t real.”

— Philip K. Dick

376. “How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just – change. With nothing causing it.”

— Philip K. Dick

377. “I don’t have time to read popular fiction. I’m too busy with work.′ Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they’re afraid of. But of course really crave.”

— Philip K. Dick

378. “Her smile increased. She had perfect white regular teeth; Irish, Juliana decided. Only Irish blood could give that jawline such femininity.”

— Philip K. Dick

379. “Most of it has probably gone into erad by now, but they may have a few terminal typescript manuscripts.”

— Philip K. Dick

380. “Well, that’s marriage these days. Legalized hate.”

— Philip K. Dick

381. “And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The old aboriginal myth; the truth, there.”

— Philip K. Dick

382. “I never liked the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.”

— Philip K. Dick

383. “Jesus Christ!” I said. “You can’t sleep with a bishop!” “I already have,” Kirsten said.”

— Philip K. Dick

384. “Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.”

— Philip K. Dick

385. “What you should do,” she told Fat during one of his darker hours, “is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34.” Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union’s salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat’s, since without the T-34 he would be speaking – not english or Latin or the koine – but German.”

— Philip K. Dick

386. “Mr. Tagomi turned to a passer-by, a thin man in rumpled suit. “What is that?” he demanded, pointing. The man grinned. “Awful, ain’t it? That’s the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view.”

— Philip K. Dick

387. “Back to Germany,” one of the cops said, surveying him. “I’m an American,” Frank Frink said. “You’re a Jew,” the cop said.”

— Philip K. Dick

388. “I believe he’s got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we’d be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we’d be one country and we’d have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.”

— Philip K. Dick

389. “There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn’t even terrible; it’s possibly funny, if even that. It’s embarrassing. That’s all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring.”

— Philip K. Dick

390. “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

391. “The man bobbed toylike in front of him, meanwhile digging into his pocket as if scratching at a familiar micro-organism that possessed parasitic proclivities that had survived the test of time.”

— Philip K. Dick

392. “So we must presume that the worst, rather than the best, choice will be made. The sober and responsible elements will be defeated in the present clash.”

— Philip K. Dick

393. “We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us.”

— Philip K. Dick

394. “You can’t go from people to nonpeople.”

— Philip K. Dick

395. “Dreadful low-class jingoistic racist invectives, unworthy of me.”

— Philip K. Dick

396. “We made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up.”

— Philip K. Dick

397. “There’s something in the Bible about falling sparrows,’ Kevin said. ‘About his eye being on them. That’s what’s wrong with God: he only has one eye.”

— Philip K. Dick

398. “I’m sorry,” Leon said. “I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe they’re flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it won’t be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and that’s the truth. If you believe in the truth – well, Phil, that’s the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.”

— Philip K. Dick

399. “He himself did not blame the president – it wasn’t the president’s fault that the Chinese had decided to honor their pact.”

— Philip K. Dick

400. “It looks,” Lotze said, gazing down, “as if it was designed by a Jew.”

— Philip K. Dick