Quotessence
Home / Authors / Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsWorldKnowsRealityMenPeopleRealWritingMindUniverse

Famous Philip K. Dick Quotes

“Because 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.”

PeopleKnowsWritingMindRealWholeBigsRealityGovernmentTodayPoliticalUniverseAsksReligiousGroupsMediaOughtCreatingCorporationsMotiveMechanismSophisticatedDistrustAstonishingPseudoBombardedBig CorporationsPolitical Groups
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image

“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 was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.”

MenHandsSoundCuttingAirCryPaintingHorrorCreaturesMouthsEarsDespiteBridgesIsolationCoveredScreamEchoesOppressedTormentTwistedRippleHowlPearsInverted
Book:Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Create image

“There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.”

LanguageVisionWindPaperLaysPatternsBeerVisualsWeedMailPapersTrashJunkAlleysJunk Mail
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image

“I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.”

HeartChildrenDoeFactsHappensPainCoursesHouseWifePlanetsSittingEmptyDepthEducatedBoresRoofMartiansSitting AloneEmpty Houses
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image

“I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”

IfsFeelsMeanI CanMatterCareSufferingFeltLosesLike YouDon't CareMoodApathyOrgansFeel BetterWorth ItNot Alone
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image

“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.”

IfsTryingWellsTwoIdeasMightHateProjectsI HateCommunicateReasonableTelepathyExtraterrestrial
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image

“God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.”

WorldSaidFoundSpaceThousandProveRemainsOrganismsFloatingProve ItAlphasLiving OrganismsGod Is DeadFloating In Space
Book:Our Friends from Frolix 8
Create image

“but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.”

MindEndsMightCertainFallFoundStepsRecordsDyingPrideStonesNotionDustWitnessDryWeedManifestVagueAlienationDegradation
Author:Philip K. Dick
Create image