Philip K. Dick citations

Page 4

“Un insecte apprend à voler, donc un autre apprend à construire une toile pour le piéger.”

“Si on veut sauver le navire, il faut parfois lancer par-dessus bord la cargaison.”

“Si on veut détruire un roi, il faut être sûr de le tuer.”

“Il faut bien que la sagesse, par sa nature même, soit rationnelle : elle est le stade ultime de tout ce qui se trouve inséré dans la réalité. Une relation intime, mais difficile à percevoir, existe entre ce qui est sage et ce qui est réel.”

“Quand on est fou, on apprend à se taire.”

“Moi, je gagne ma vie comme auteur de science-fiction. Je fais dans les récits imaginaires. Ma vie en est un.”

“Une des grandes manifestations de la miséricorde divine consiste à nous tenir perpétuellement dans le brouillard.”

“I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.”

“If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.”

“I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”

“We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.”

“The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.”

“It's easy to win. Anybody can win.”

“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.”

“What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?”

“The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.”

“In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.”

“I have seen myself backward.”

“We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

“Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.”

“When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”

“What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.”

“The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.”

“Life… is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.”

“It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.”

“Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn’t Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?”

“That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.”

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

“Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof. Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him. He was seeing—them.”

“You’re not just out of your body; you’re out of your mind, too.”

“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 perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical — I believe it.”

“The emotional masses of ordinary people who resented the Great Work, the bombs and bacteria and guided missiles, were coming to the surface. The were rising up - finally. Putting an end to super-logic: rationality without responsibility.”

“matter is plastic in the face of mind.”

“The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour.”

“It’s not religious fervor; it’s just a mean, very cruel streak.”

“One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."”