A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

To survive in this fascist police state, he thought, you gotta always be able to come up with a name, your name. At all times. That’s the first sign they look for that you’re wired, not being able to figure out who the hell you are.

It will be a hindsight I won’t even get to have. Somebody else will have to have it for me.

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

“Do you think,” he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, “that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically?

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today.

It’s the slushed leading the slushed. And right into doom.

Simple Ways to Smuggle Objects into the U.S. and out, Depending on Which Way You’re Going.

“Bob, you know something . . .” Luckman said at last. “I used to be the same age as everyone else.” “I think so was I,” Arctor said.

“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking; it can’t stop looking.”

Now I can walk down the street outside and see something. I can hear water when we visit the forest—you’ll see our other facilities later on, farms and so forth. I can walk down the street, the ordinary street, and see the little dogs and cats. I never saw them before. All I saw was dope.”

There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past.

When a person went to the doctor—there was only one, and he specialized in everything—there was only one medicine. After he had diagnosed you he prescribed the medicine. You took the slip to the pharmacy to have it filled, but the pharmacist never could read what the doctor had written, so he gave you the only pill he had, which was aspirin. And it cured whatever you had.