Philip K. Dick

Fully absorbed in the peculiar text he had become totally oblivious to the noises and movements around him; all that existed for him now was the printed page held motionless before his intense scrutiny.

The book business is hidebound.

You're a goldmine of misinformation.

The vidphone company let me off the hook.

That's the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think—you imagine—the police are behind everything. You get paranoid and think they're beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you. Actually the police wouldn't do that. The police are our friends.

Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly. “The police are our friends.” The hell they are!

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.

If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho...even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.

I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations.

Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn't discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are.

This one fact alone, Rachmael reflected, should have frightened the rational citizen. But—

The people did not know. The media had not reported it.

The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour.

He flushes at his presence in a comfort station.