“Everything in life is just for a while.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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 misfiring- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“It's easy to win. Anybody can win.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“What was on the other side?"
Donna said, "He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it."
"He... never went through it?"
"That’s why he kicked the shit out of everything in his apartment; he never thought of going through it, he just admired the doorway and then later he couldn’t see it at all and it was too late. It opened for him a few days and then it was closed and gone forever.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“After he saw God [Tony Amsterdam] felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn’t seen God. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping.”
“Like the rest of us.” It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty.
Donna said, “That’s what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn’t freak the rest of us. And he said, ‘You don’t know what I saw. You don’t know.’ ”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-- as near as I can figure out, God is dead."
Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Don't never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“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 little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path," Charles Freck said, "is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there."
"Your spleen next," Barris said.
"They what, they cut -- What does that do, a spleen?"
"Helps you digest your food."
"How?"
"By removing the cellulose from it."
"Then I guess after that --"
"Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa."
"How long can you live that way?"
Barris said, "It depends on your attitude."
"How many spleens does the average person have?" He knew there usually were two kidneys.
"Depends on his weight and age."
"Why?" Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.
"A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he's eighty --"
"You're shitting me.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
“Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick
Born place: in Chicago, Illinois, The United States
Born date December 16, 1928
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“... je t'emmènerais dans une contrée resplendissante et prospère, au foyer d'une famille aristocratique des lettrés, fastueux domaine où abondent les fleurs et les saules, terroir de la douceur, de richesse et d'honneurs, pour t'installer dans la joie et en toute sécurité.
Cao Xueqin, "Le Rêve dans le pavillon rouge", trad, fr. par Li Tche-Houa, J. Alézaïs, révision par A. D'Hormon, Paris, Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", 1981, vol. 1, p. 8.”
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― Kristen Zimmer, quote from The Gravity Between Us
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