Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Maybe – after 14 months all I really know is that I don’t know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That’s.”

— Philip K. Dick

352. “I’ve married before and it was no better, and if I divorce Kathy I’ll marry again – because as my brainbasher puts it I can’t find my identity outside the role of husband and daddy and big butter-and-egg-man wage earner – and the next damn one will be the same because that’s the kind I select. It’s rooted in my temperament.”

— Philip K. Dick

353. “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

354. “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

355. “It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice. How can justice fall victim, even, to what is right?”

— Philip K. Dick

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre.”

— Philip K. Dick

360. “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

361. “But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”

— Philip K. Dick

362. “Consciousness of unconsciousness.”

— Philip K. Dick

363. “I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

368. “People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. the research, of course fails.”

— Philip K. Dick

369. “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

370. “The termination of a relationship,” he said, “is not a misunderstanding. It’s a reorganization of life.”

— Philip K. Dick

371. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

378. “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

379. “But reality cannot be ignored; we must grow up.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “The ignorance of the dark-skinned strata, despite the government’s ceaseless educational campaigns. No wonder their women were often preg.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

386. “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

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. “Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.”

— Philip K. Dick

389. “It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it’s unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they’ll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.”

— Philip K. Dick

390. “I didn’t choose to get entangled in my domestic life, my boxer’s clinch with Kathy. And if you think I did or do, it’s because you’re morbidly young. You’ve failed to pass from adolescent freedom into the land which I inhabit: married to a woman who is economically, intellectually, and even this, too, even erotically my superior.”

— Philip K. Dick

391. “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.”

— Philip K. Dick

392. “But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn’t matter.”

— Philip K. Dick

393. “But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen.”

— Philip K. Dick

394. “In a foolish and loud manner he had argued politics; he had been rude in his disagreeing, and only the adroit tact of his host had sufficed to save the evening. How much I have to learn, Childan thought. They’re so graceful and polite. And I – the white barbarian. It is true.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

397. “What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Better they should enjoy their temporary lives, while they still had them to enjoy.”

— Philip K. Dick

398. “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

399. “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

400. “All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind.”

— Philip K. Dick