Martian Time-Slip Quotes

“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”
― Philip K Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn't of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point—to embalm them.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“A man driven by rage may stumble, in his passion, onto truth.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic—that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality. And that child wound up by being expelled from the school; he went, after that, to another sort of school entirely, one designed to rehabilitate him: he went to Camp Ben-Gurion. He could not be taught, he could only be dealt with as ill.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Sheep are funny," the Whitlock said. "Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they'll spot that from a mile away." The Whitlock chuckled. "They're smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn't having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words...it's being able to spot what's to our advantage. It's got to be useful to be real smartness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“What had tormented him ever since the psychotic episode with the personnel manager at Corona Corporation was this: suppose it was not a hallucination? Suppose the so-called personnel manager was as he had seen him, an artificial construct, a machine like these teaching machines?
If that had been the case, then there was no psychosis.
Instead of a psychosis, he had thought again and again, it was more on the order of a vision, a glimpse of absolute reality, with the façade stripped away. And it was so crushing, so radical an idea, that it could not be meshed with his ordinary views. And the mental disturbance had come out of that.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“His thoughts," Helio said, "are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him. We are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land." At that Arnie laughed loud and long. "Truth always amuses the ignorant," Helio said.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural. And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one's course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“The Public School, then, was right to eject a child who did not learn. Because what the child was learning was not merely facts or the basis of a money-making or even useful career. It went much deeper. The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost. His values were fused with some objective human enterprise. And so he himself became a part of the tradition handed down to him; he maintained his heritage during his lifetime and even improved on it. He cared.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“. . . to the Bleekmen, we Earthmen may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity, expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“I'd say, Doc, I can see you under the aspect of eternity and you're dead.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Is he sick because he sees this? Or does he see this because he is sick?”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless . . . vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairmen’s Union, Martian Branch. Wow, how he hated the bastards; his hatred had warped his life and he recognized that—and he did nothing about it: he wanted it to warp him. He wanted to keep on hating them, the vast monolithic structure, wherever it existed.
They had caught him for giving socialized repair.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“drive the wild Bleekmen from their last”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“I once saw a ballgame.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip