01c. 1955 ADI've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
02c. 1955 ADI 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.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
03c. 1955 ADThere is evil! It's actual, like cement.I can't believe it. I can't stand it.Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
04c. 1955 ADIt takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
06c. 1955 ADYou mean old books?""Stories written before space travel but about space travel.""How could there have been stories about space travel before --""The writers," Pris said, "made it up.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
07c. 1955 ADWell, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
08c. 1955 ADI think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and itinspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
09c. 1955 ADA merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
10c. 1955 ADIf this place were closer to Terra there’d be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There’d be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
11c. 1955 ADIt’s not just the drive. They’re right out front. Everywhere. Waiting for me. All day and night.”“Who are, dear?”“Robots selling things. As soon as I set down the ship. Robots and visual-audio ads. They dig right into a man’s brain. They follow people around until they die.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
12c. 1955 ADYou 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.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
13c. 1955 ADGod'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.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
14c. 1955 ADLove isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
15c. 1955 ADWhen I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
16c. 1955 ADThe authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
17c. 1955 ADWhat sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history... We would be hard put to defend the use of the term 'imaginary' then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an 'imaginary' voice telling him to sail west, or a 'real' voice telling him the idea was hopeless?Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
18c. 1955 ADBecause of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
19c. 1955 AD...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newnessPhilip K. Dick / quote ↗
20c. 1955 ADI am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
21c. 1955 ADTomorrow morning, he decided, I'll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That's the initial step.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
22c. 1955 ADWhat you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
23c. 1955 ADA man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
24c. 1955 ADThat's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself.Philip K. Dick / quote ↗
