Quotes from VALIS

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. ”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. ”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer."
"Did he show you slides?"
We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that -- as if that weren't enough -- but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Sometimes I dream--"
"I'll put that on your gravestone.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

“Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from VALIS

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Popular quotes

“First I lost my heart. Then I lost my mind.”
― Jennifer Salvato Doktorski, quote from How My Summer Went Up in Flames

“Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.”
― Alice Sebold, quote from The Almost Moon

“In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quote from Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“When I was twelve, my appendix burst, and as they were wheeling my ass into the operating room, I asked the doctor, “How will this affect my piano playing?” and he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play the piano,” and I said, “Wow! I wasn’t able to before!” And then they gassed me.”
― John Scalzi, quote from Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas

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