The Valis Trilogy Quotes

“Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren't enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“FISH CANNOT CARRY GUNS! If we abandoned that, we entered the paradoxes, and, finally, death. Stupid as our motto sounded, we had fabricated in it the insight we needed. There was nothing more to know.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person. Where are the roses? Where is the lake? Where is the slim, smiling, attractive woman coiling and tugging the green garden hose? The person that I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“GOD IS NO WHERE
GOD IS NOW HERE”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“The real danger, the ultimate horror, happens when the creating and protecting, the sheltering, comes first—and then the destruction. Because if this is the sequence, everything built up ends in death.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“I don’t believe in God,” Kevin said. “I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn’t do.” “Are you kidding me?” “No,” Kevin said. “Where did the Great Punta come from?” “Only the Great Punta knows.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed “astral determinism.” We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. “The Empire never ended.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“A theophany consists of a self-disclosure by the divine. It does not consist of something the percipient does; it consists of something the divine—the God or gods, the high power—does. Moses did not create the burning bush. Elijah, on Mount Horeb, did not generate the low, murmuring voice. How are we to distinguish a genuine theophany from a mere hallucination on the part of the percipient? If the voice tells him something he does not know and could not know, then perhaps we are dealing with the genuine thing and not the spurious.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb, and weak.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.” Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“exegesis,”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn’t say. In Horselover Fat’s case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“There wasn’t a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Seagulls croaked by overhead, sailing themselves like frisbees.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“women always put on too much makeup when someone dies.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“It was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America—1960 to 1970—and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up. The authorities became as psychotic as those they hunted.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“One of God’s greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“Thank you, Tim Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“It had been Fat’s delusion for years that he could help people.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“If you’ll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“I am by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“thinkers were hylozoists. A “hylozoist” believes that the universe is alive; it’s about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were. Here time turns into space.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“In effect, he no longer claimed that what he experienced was actually there. Did this indicate he had begun to get better? Hardly. Now he held the view that “they” or God or someone owned a long-range very tight information-rich beam of energy focussed on Fat’s head. In this I saw no improvement, but it did represent a change.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“The term “journal” is mine, not Fat’s. His term was “exegesis,” a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture, even if it just applied to his son’s undiagnosed right inguinal hernia which had popped the hydrocele and gone down into the scrotal sack.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it’s exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color. However, he could never really find it again. Nothing could generate that color for light but God. In other words, normal light did not contain that color. One time Fat studied a color chart, a chart of the visible spectrum. The color was absent. He had seen a color which no one can see; it lay off the end. What comes after light in terms of frequency? Heat? Radio waves? I should know but I don’t. Fat told me (I don’t know how true this is) that in the solar spectrum what he saw was above seven hundred millimicrons; in terms of Fraunhofer Lines, past B in the direction of A. Make of that what you will. I deem it a symptom of Fat’s breakdown. People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series