Quotes from Now Wait for Last Year

“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, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“In marriage the greatest hatred that is possible between human beings can be generated, perhaps because of the constant proximity, perhaps because once there was love. The intimacy is still there, even though the love element has disappeared. So a will to power, a struggle for domination, comes into being.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“...that thing that's taken refuge there in that zinc bucket, without a wife, a career, a conapt, or money or the possibility of encountering any of these, still persists. For reasons unknown to me its stake in existence is greater than mine.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“The termination of a relationship," he said, "is not a misunderstanding. It's a reorganization of life.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Does she make the heavens fall?" "Yes, she pulls down everything." Molinari nodded. "It's a psionic talent she has... it's called being a woman.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"

"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."

"That's right," Eric said.
"I'd stay with her," the cab decided.
"Why?"
"Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."

"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her."
God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Eric, I'm going to pay you back for leaving me." She smoothed her dress. "You understand?" "Yes," he said, and walked into the kitchen. "I'll devote my life to it," Kathy said, from the bedroom. "Now I have a reason for living. It's wonderful to have a purpose at last; it's thrilling. After all these pointless ugly years with you. God, it's like being born all over again." "Lots of luck," he said.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime—we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“I hope I never get in a fix like that," Taubman said. "Hating someone I once loved.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“But she looked—smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost—age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife, since he had seen her last, had become frail, and he did not like this; despite his animosity he felt concern.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Well, that's marriage these days. Legalized hate.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“There ought to be an ordinance that a man can't work for the same outfit as his wife; hell, even in the same city.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“I've married before and it was no better, and if I divorce Kathy I'll marry again—because as my brainbasher puts it I can't find my identity outside the role of husband and daddy and big butter-and-egg-man wage earner—and the next damn one will be the same because that's the kind I select. It's rooted in my temperament.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“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, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Everything's the same, when you break through to absolute reality; it's all one vast blur.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“most horrid sound in the world, that of the once-was: alive in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart—it was already deep in her heart, surely—then there will be no more woman. And you won't survive that. No matter what I or any man chooses to do.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Always this barrier, this impossibility of getting through. This time he did not waste his time trying; he simply went on stroking her, thinking, It'll be on my conscience, whatever happens to her. And she knows it, too. So she's absolved of the burden of responsibility, and that, for her, is the worst thing possible. Too bad, he thought, I wasn't able to make love to her.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“In marriage the greatest hatred that is possible between human beings can be generated, perhaps because of the constant proximity, perhaps because once there was love. The intimacy is still there, even though the love element has disappeared. So a will to power, a struggle for domination, comes into being.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“The most horrid sound in the world, that of the once-was: alive in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other... now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“she had it—his soul—and she was turning it over and over on her tongue. Goddam her!”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“And what good was a political strategist who couldn't look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn't want his country to survive him.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

“I've been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it's just not coming again.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Now Wait for Last Year

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Popular quotes

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“No permanence is ours; we are a wave
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“Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

“But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?”

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