Philip K. Dick

“What about -- not sex -- but love?''Love is another name for sex.''Like love of country,' Rick said. 'Love of music.”

“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.”

“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.”

“They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.”

“I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.”

“The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”

“I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.”

“I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”

“The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.”

“The ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister.”

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”

“We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.”

“The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they'd meditated on how to ball her, and remained.”

“I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the very end of the struggle you've made no progress at all. That upon discovering that, you've raised to a lofty moral height, and you've accepted your fate, and somehow went on.”

“Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It's a big business, I am told.”

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

“Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.”

“Comprehension follows perception.”

“God's M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.”

“You know, the way I feel, if I read a science fiction book by a new writer which is a lot better than what I do, instead of going on a bummer right away and saying, “Oh Christ, I’m obsolete, I’m outdated, I’ve lost it.” I have this tremendous sense of joy. I don’t have to write all the great goddamn science fiction in the world. Somebody else is going to carry this torch. It’s such a relief to sit with my feet up on the wall and to know that if I never wrote another book science fiction is going ahead.”