152 quotes
The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Spinoza saw... that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, "I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second."
The Android and the Human (1972)
It sounds like they're saying passive life is good, he thought. But there is no such thing as passive life. That's a contradiction.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
We'll know homo superior when he comes — by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth.
The Golden Man (1954)
I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway.
It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them.
Skill is a function of chance. It's an intuitive best-use of chance situations.
Solar Lottery (1955)
Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can't destroy their brains; they have none.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
A psychologist said, “They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn't real, but that it’s reversed.”
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
He glared at her. Women can get a man to do anything, he realized. Mother, wife, even employee; they twist us like hot little bits of thermoplastic.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)
He had reached a critical region; he was about to move through worlds of intricate complexity.
The Golden Man (1954)
Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.
My audience will always be limited to those people.
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
"You of all people," the void communicated. "Out of everyone, it is you I love the most."
VALIS (1981)
She did not really want to know; she believed she understood already.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)