VALIS & Later Novels Quotes

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat’s question, “Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?” receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: “Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos,” which, according to Fat, is living information.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“The gentle sounds of the choir singing “Amen, amen” are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Thomas,” Fat told me, “is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality.” He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other personality in his head!”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“That's really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious? Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“When something begins to devour the world, a serious matter is taking place. If the devouring entity is evil or insane, the situation is not merely serious; it is grim. But Fat viewed the process the other way around. He viewed it exactly as Plato had viewed it in his own cosmology: the rational mind (noös) persuades the irrational (chance, blind determinism, ananke), into cosmos.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Fat had witnessed a benign power which had invaded this world. No other term fitted it: the benign power, whatever it was, had invaded this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified him but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“His disciples asked him what this parable might mean, and he said, ‘The mysteries of the kingdom of God are revealed to you, for the rest there are only parables, so that they might see but not perceive, listen but not understand.’” (Luke 8:9/10)”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series