Philip K. Dick

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Where there's dope, there's hope!

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgement. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

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.

She took his hand, squeezed it, held it, and then, all at once, she let it drop. But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

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.”

Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.

“Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”

“It’s a lost art,” Hank said. “Maybe there’s an instruction manual on it.”

Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.

If I had known it was harmless

I would have killed it myself.