152 quotes
"matter is plastic in the face of mind."
VALIS (1981)
“Isn’t there any way—” He broke off. Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone, and I might as well get out of here.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost … perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Cris didn't play fair. He had watched half an hour — then come out and thrown once. One perfect toss, one dead ringer.
The Golden Man (1954)
“Everything is true”, he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.”
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement ... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus ... thereby it becomes its enemies.
VALIS (1981)
The inflexible path along which he moved would not deviate in that direction. It would not turn him that way. The golden figure in that scene, the miniature doll in that room, was only distantly related to him. It was himself, but a faraway self.
[Fiction] Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's bad off, isn't it?
Solar Lottery (1955)
We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
I'm not much, but I'm all I have.
Martian Time-Slip (1964)
I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
"You don't go by odds. You know what's coming. You've seen the cards already." She studied his face intently. "No, you can't be cold-decked. It wouldn't be possible."
The Golden Man (1954)
The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns.
Eye in the Sky (1957)
It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you.
The Divine Invasion (1981)
I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both.
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
The emotional masses of ordinary people who resented the Great Work, the bombs and bacteria and guided missiles, were coming to the surface. The were rising up - finally. Putting an end to super-logic: rationality without responsibility.
People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.
Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)