Top 500 Philip K. Dick Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.”

— Philip K. Dick

353. “Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.”

— Philip K. Dick

354. “Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we’re whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We’re at the mercy of some kind of whim.”

— Philip K. Dick

355. “Watching him, Juliana thought, It’s idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.”

— Philip K. Dick

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

360. “The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.”

— Philip K. Dick

361. “Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home alone 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

362. “He fixed things – clocks, refrigerators, vidsenders and destinies.”

— Philip K. Dick

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “Consciousness of unconsciousness.”

— Philip K. Dick

367. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— 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. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

381. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

383. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

385. “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

386. “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

387. “The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.”

— Philip K. Dick

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

393. “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

394. “One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

396. “Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick

398. “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

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

— Philip K. Dick

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

— Philip K. Dick