The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Quotes

“We are all sleeping avatars of God, with amnesia.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Maybe—after 14 months all I really know is that I don’t know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That’s”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Both of those alternate universes were wonderful. Different from each other but equally wonderful. In different ways (in the poor Mexican one I enjoyed being close to the streetnote street, not “earth” or “soil”—and being in a familiar place. In the wealthy cosmopolitan one I enjoyed variety and expensive tastes), each was equally complete, an entire world. It’s as if God informed me:  “You turn north, I’ll spin for you an entire world and a wonderful one which you’ll love.”“You turn south, I’ll plant you in a little town and it’ll be a whole universe, that little town, with dreams about other towns in the north, rumors of wealth you will treasure as rumors.”“You decided to live dead-center, and I will show you that the Tao, which is what you have found in Fullerton, because there you do speak in public, you do receive royal guests, but near you is the poor barrio, and you’re stuck in Fullerton forever as if you were poor—you decide on the Tao, the Middle Path, and I will show you that each path is the Middle Path, that there is no universe which I can’t make complete. You can’t be where I am not. And if I am there, which I always am, it is a total world, good as any other.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Nietzche is right about christianity. It's the fucking hair shirt syndrome: always made me feel shame, guilt, always responding to duty and obligations to others --I view myself as weak, at the beck and call of others, obligated to them. Bullshit. "I am a man" -- as that book on judaism puts it. I need no one's permission anymore. I need not account to anyone. I owe them nothing; they are pushing old buttons, long out of date. I have proved my worth and earned my reward.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“The heart can know peace but the mind cannot be satisfied; the drive to know, to possess intellectual certitude is doomed to failure.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“We and our environments form such interconnected cluster systems that mutually process information and alter it while exchanging it; we are all (humans) like a vast compound eye which shows a repetition of the motion of a single object but each cell reflecting slightly differently. (p.155)”
― Philip K. Dick , The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“All we know is that things happen. More accurately, God is the urging-forward force within all things, and all things (if “things” can be spoken of at all) are alive. The ontological matrix is a way in which His urging or thinking is manifested; so in that respect I think it’s not time which moves forward, carrying us with it like a great tide, but that we are driven forward all of us together, animate and inanimate.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, “And she shall see the sea.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“The most ominous element from my books which I am encountering in my actual life is this. In one of my novels, Ubik, certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment. In my novel what broke through was the presence of a man who had died. He speaks to them through several intermediary systems and hence must still be alive; it is they, evidently, who are dead. What has been happening to me for over three months is that a man I knew who died has been breaking through in ways so similar to that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead and he is alive, or—well, as in the novel, I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense. Even scarier is that this man, before his death, believed that those who are dead can “come across” to those who are alive. He was sure his own son who had recently died was doing this with him. Now this man is dead and it would seem he is “coming across” to me.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can’t figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism? It’s too much for me.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“However, I do think one could say this; rather than having it read: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, one could put it this way: PHILIP K. DICK
By
Ubik In a sense I am joking, of course, but in a sense I am not.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”—language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here—which is to say now—but will be,”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“What best can I do? Exactly what I’ve done. My voice for the voiceless. —Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Let people call me crazy; fuck them.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“The mortal human only anticipates as a lower lifeform, the form to come....”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Our minds are occluded, deliberately, so that we can't see the prison world we're slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost memories. This entity may even be an old wino.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“By the way, the town where Asklepios’ sanitarium existed, I read now, is up in the mountains. Probably the climate was and is cool and moist; I read it’s heavily wooded. I bet the stars are quite visible there. It’s the place I yearn for. Out of memory.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“And when I gave my phone number the last two times I gave it wrong—another number. And to me the weirdest thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never heard of before. I’m afraid to call them; I don’t know why.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Ubik is clearly an allegory for the Christian concept of “grace”; author Michael Bishop has written that Ubik is “whatever gets you through the dark night of the soul.” In the Exegesis, Ubik becomes shorthand for redemption”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“But I feel a unity between the force which changed me and the red and gold energy which I saw. From within me, as part of me, it looked out and saw itself.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick