fe0e2b5
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What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.
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Philip K. Dick |
435a3d1
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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."
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meaninglessness
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Philip K. Dick |
7089ec3
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But--let me tell you my cat joke. It's very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she's got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room--has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak--and it's gone. And there's the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing it's face."..
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ontology
joke
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Philip K. Dick |
a413574
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At that moment, when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn't feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting--do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sig..
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Philip K. Dick |
169a1e1
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Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up.
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Philip K. Dick |
8f39696
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Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. [...] It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny o..
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Philip K. Dick |
4c57319
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He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
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Philip K. Dick |
bdfc70b
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Emigrate or Degenerate.
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Philip K. Dick |
6e67ed4
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I 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.
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Philip K. Dick |
9d8e95f
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Mors certa, vita incerta,
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latin
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Philip K. Dick |
c190f7f
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On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
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Philip K. Dick |
948121d
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We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
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truth
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Philip K. Dick |
3be4399
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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 o..
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Philip K. Dick |
3dc474c
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How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.
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Philip K. Dick |
6432ca5
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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..
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Philip K. Dick |
cdd9abd
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Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.
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life
truth
thought
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Philip K. Dick |
767f8b7
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The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
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grief
spirituality
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Philip K. Dick |
178a667
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I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.
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Philip K. Dick |
304a0c9
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It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense
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Philip K. Dick |
e609d5f
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The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else wa..
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münch
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Philip K. Dick |
f6f9e6b
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I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.
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Philip K. Dick |
a691a4f
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When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.
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Philip K. Dick |
92968e2
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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.
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valis
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Philip K. Dick |
df2f935
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There 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.
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Philip K. Dick |
4789ea6
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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.
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substance-abuse
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Philip K. Dick |
433f9a4
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I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.
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Philip K. Dick |
9fd521d
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The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.
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Philip K. Dick |
99c200d
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It's easy to win. Anybody can win.
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life-and-living
loser
winning
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Philip K. Dick |
6e45bc9
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We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
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Philip K. Dick |
00a4734
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We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
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Philip K. Dick |
7f45d43
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Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.
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Philip K. Dick |
caf64bf
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The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
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mentally-disturbed
religion
science
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Philip K. Dick |
5c1d725
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Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.
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Philip K. Dick |
6863f18
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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.
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self-awareness
spirituality
humor
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Philip K. Dick |
f08608a
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Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.
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mind
matter
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Philip K. Dick |
ccc13d9
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I have seen myself backward.
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self-awareness
realization
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Philip K. Dick |
5e1d3a8
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I mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?
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Philip K. Dick |
333cea8
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From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
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commercialisation
humour
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Philip K. Dick |
1caf340
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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."
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Philip K. Dick |
955d65f
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Well, 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.
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telepathy
science-fiction
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Philip K. Dick |
2a5faab
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But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.
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bohemian
bohemianism
artistic
artist
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Philip K. Dick |
9325583
|
Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died--in his thirties--of kidney disease. And had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually ..
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Philip K. Dick |
25857ea
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I 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...
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Philip K. Dick |
dfe757e
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But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.
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Philip K. Dick |