Philip K. Dick Zitate

seite 8

„Es sollte ein Gesetz geben, nach dem jemand, der sich umbringt, in ein Clownskostüm gesteckt und in diesem Aufzug dann fotografiert wird. Und sein Bild sollte in allen Zeitungen veröffentlicht werden.“

„In der Ehe manifestiert sich der größte Haß, den Menschen füreinander überhaupt empfinden können, und dies liegt vielleicht am ständigen Zusammensein und vielleicht auch daran, daß man sich einst geliebt hat. Die Intimität untereinander existiert noch immer, auch wenn die Liebe verschwunden ist. Und so tritt der Wille zur Macht ans Tageslicht, der Wunsch, den anderen zu beherrschen.“

„Was, wenn ein Symphonieorchester nur bestrebt wäre, zur letzten Koda zu kommen? Was würde dann aus der Musik? Ein einziges Getöse, das so schnell wie möglich endet. Die Musik aber liegt im Prozess, in der Entwicklung – wenn man sie beschleunigt, vernichtet man sie. Dann ist die Musik vorbei.“

„Wir bezeichnen Menschen, die mit Gott reden, als gläubig – und wir bezeichnen Menschen, zu denen Gott spricht, als geisteskrank. Dies ist ein Zeitalter, in dem es nur wenig Glauben gibt. Nicht Gott ist es, der tot ist, es ist unser Glaube, der gestorben ist.“

„Der Geist eines Junkies ist wie die Musik, die du aus dem Radiowecker hörst - manchmal klingt sie ja ganz hübsch, aber sie ist nur dazu da, dich zu etwas Bestimmtem zu veranlassen. Die Musik aus dem Radiowecker soll dich aufwecken; die Musik des Junkies soll dich in ein Werkzeug zur Beschaffung von immer mehr Stoff verwandeln.“

“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 a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”

“Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed … Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.”

““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 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.”

““Why?” Hamilton lashed out suddenly and loudly. “Why the hell did God answer that prayer? Why not some of the others? Why not Bill Laws’s?”
“God approved of your prayer,” Silky said. “After all, it’s up to Him; He has to decide how He feels about it.”
“That’s terrible.”
Silky shrugged. “Maybe so.”
“How can you live with that? You never know what’s going to happen—there’s no order, no logic.” It infuriated him that she did not object, that it seemed natural to her. “We’re helpless; we have to depend on whim. It keeps us from being people—we’re like animals waiting to be fed. Rewarded or punished.””

“They think they are free because they have never been free, and do not know what it means.”

“He flushes at his presence in a comfort station.”

“We'll know homo superior when he comes — by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth.”

“But frankly—may I so speak?—your CIA people’s theory strikes me as a miserable bundle of random suspicions, a few separate facts strung together by an intricate structure of ad hoc theorizing, in which everyone is credited with enormous powers for intrigue. A much simpler view can be entertained with more common sense, and as a CIA employee you must be aware that, like all intelligence agencies, it lacks the faculty of common sense.”

“Our methods may seem strange and indirect. Even incomprehensible. But I assure you we know what we're doing.”

“"No communication." Baines was sweating. "In eighteen years there hasn't been any semantic bridge between you? Does he have any contact? Signs? Codes?"
"He — ignores us. He eats here, stays with us. Sometimes he plays when we play. Or sits with us. He's gone days on end. We've never been able to find out what he's doing — or where. He sleeps in the barn — by himself."”

“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.”

“"He's too far ahead of us. We can't compete with him." Wisdom's eyes were bleak. "We can only guess what's going to happen. He knows. For him, it's a sure thing. I don't think it'll help him at euth, though. The whole stage is flooded simultaneously. Instantaneous gas, released throughout." He signalled impatiently to the guards. "Get going. Take him down right away. Don't waste any time."”

“The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down.”

“Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer.”

“"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."”

“But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.”

“To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality.”

“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.”

“"You are certain you can keep the truth from her?"
"Sure," Ed said confidently. "I know I can."
"All right." The Old Man nodded slowly. "I will send you back. But you must tell no one." He swelled visibly. "Remember: you will eventually come back to me — everyone does, in the end — and your fate will not be enviable."”

“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.”

“The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known.”

“Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.”

“Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this.”

“He awoke—and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.”

“For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.”

“Here, the enemy was not merely another group of human beings with a differing political persuasion; the enemy here was death.”

“And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency. … It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: having your job and your sin commingled.”

“'“Everything is true”, he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.””