Quotes by Philip K. Dick

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.

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.

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. Thats closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

And, my dad concluded, calming down a little, all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, mans little and cant fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

In his article, Bogen concluded: “I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western Man. . . .

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

Youre - psychotic. Theres something wrong with you.I know, Benteley agreed. Im a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. Im so sick I think everybody else is sick and Im the only healthy person. Thats pretty bad off, isnt it?

Then the true name for religion, Fat said, is death.The secret name, I agreed. You got it. Jesus died; Asklepios died - they killed Mani worse than they killef jesus, but nobody even cares; nobody even remembers. They killed the Catharist in southern France by the tens of thousands. In the Thirty Years War, hundreds of people died. Protestants and Catholics - manual slaughter. Death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love - death. Kevin is rights about his cat. Its all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge cant answer Kevin: Why did my cat die? Answer: Damned i I knoe. There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. Were all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw. Go ask Kevin. Your cat was stupid. Who made the cat? Why did he make the cat stupid? Did the cat learn by being killed, and if so, what did he learn? Did Sherri learn anything from dying of cancer? did gloria learn anything-Okay, enough, Fat said.Kevin is right, I said. Go out and get laid.By who? theyre all dead.I said, Theres more. Still alive. Lay one of them before she dies or you die or somebody dies, some person or animal. You said it yourself: the universe is irrational because the mind behind it is irrational. You are irrational and you know it. We all are and we know it, on some level. Id write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human being could be as irrational as we are, as weve acted.

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

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnt go away.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

Basically, Sherris idea had to do with bringing Fats 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.

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 werent 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.

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. Its not much, but its always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

Maybe I shouldn’t have told you––about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.“No, Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather––“ He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.