Philip K. Dick citations Page 8

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

SIVA, 1981

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

SIVA, 1981

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

SIVA, 1981

“A rolling stone gathers no moss.'
Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, 'Well, it means a person who's always active and never pauses to reflect — ' No, that didn't sound right. I tried again. 'That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won't grow stale.' He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, 'I mean, a man who's active and doesn't let grass grow under his feet, he'll get ahead in life.'
Doctor Nisea said, 'I see.' And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.
'What does it mean?' I asked. 'Did I get it backward?'
'Yes, I'm afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you've given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who — '
'You don't have to tell me,' I broke in. 'I remember — I really knew it. A person who's unstable will never acquire anything of value.”

SIVA, 1981

Philip K. Dick: Citations en anglais

“One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”

Philip K. Dick livre We Can Build You

Source: We Can Build You (1972), chapter 17, page 224.

“Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed … Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.”

Philip K. Dick livre A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 6 (p. 91)

““Isn’t there any way—” He broke off. Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone, and I might as well get out of here.”

Philip K. Dick livre A Maze of Death

A Maze of Death (1970)

“The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns.”

Philip K. Dick livre The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Source: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Chapter 10 (p. 173)

““Why?” Hamilton lashed out suddenly and loudly. “Why the hell did God answer that prayer? Why not some of the others? Why not Bill Laws’s?”
“God approved of your prayer,” Silky said. “After all, it’s up to Him; He has to decide how He feels about it.”
“That’s terrible.”
Silky shrugged. “Maybe so.”
“How can you live with that? You never know what’s going to happen—there’s no order, no logic.” It infuriated him that she did not object, that it seemed natural to her. “We’re helpless; we have to depend on whim. It keeps us from being people—we’re like animals waiting to be fed. Rewarded or punished.””

Philip K. Dick livre Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 2 (p. 15)

“They think they are free because they have never been free, and do not know what it means.”

Philip K. Dick livre Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 6 (p. 77)

“He flushes at his presence in a comfort station.”

Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion

The Divine Invasion (1981)

“We'll know homo superior when he comes — by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth.”

Source: Lies, Inc. (1984), Chapter 13 (p. 139)

“But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people’s theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense.”

Source: The Golden Man (1954)

“Our methods may seem strange and indirect. Even incomprehensible. But I assure you we know what we're doing.”

Philip K. Dick livre Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 8, (p. 123)

“"No communication." Baines was sweating. "In eighteen years there hasn't been any semantic bridge between you? Does he have any contact? Signs? Codes?"
"He — ignores us. He eats here, stays with us. Sometimes he plays when we play. Or sits with us. He's gone days on end. We've never been able to find out what he's doing — or where. He sleeps in the barn — by himself."”

Philip K. Dick livre Adjustment Team

Adjustment Team (1954)

“I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.”

The Golden Man (1954)

“"He's too far ahead of us. We can't compete with him." Wisdom's eyes were bleak. "We can only guess what's going to happen. He knows. For him, it's a sure thing. I don't think it'll help him at euth, though. The whole stage is flooded simultaneously. Instantaneous gas, released throughout." He signalled impatiently to the guards. "Get going. Take him down right away. Don't waste any time."”

Philip K. Dick La Transmigration de Timothy Archer

Page 158
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

“The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down.”

The Golden Man (1954)

“Life is short. 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.”

Philip K. Dick livre Confessions of a Crap Artist

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

“"You don't go by odds. You know what's coming. You've seen the cards already." She studied his face intently. "No, you can't be cold-decked. It wouldn't be possible."”

Philip K. Dick livre The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

“But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.”

The Golden Man (1954)

“To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality.”

Philip K. Dick livre The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Source: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Chapter 10 (p. 168)

“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost…perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well.”

Philip K. Dick livre The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

“"You are certain you can keep the truth from her?"
"Sure," Ed said confidently. "I know I can."
"All right." The Old Man nodded slowly. "I will send you back. But you must tell no one." He swelled visibly. "Remember: you will eventually come back to me — everyone does, in the end — and your fate will not be enviable."”

Philip K. Dick livre A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 11 (pp. 185-186)

“People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.”

Philip K. Dick livre Adjustment Team

Adjustment Team (1954)

“The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known.”

Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

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

Source: Lies, Inc. (1984), Chapter 8 (p. 79)

“Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this.”

Philip K. Dick livre SIVA

VALIS (1981)

“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.”

Philip K. Dick livre The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Source: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Chapter 8 (p. 143)

“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 has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.”

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"
The Phillip K. Dick Reader

“Here, the enemy was not merely another group of human beings with a differing political persuasion; the enemy here was death.”

Philip K. Dick livre Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 21 (p. 230)

“And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency. … It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: having your job and your sin commingled.”

Philip K. Dick livre Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 5 (pp. 69-70)

“'“Everything is true”, he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.””

Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)