Galactic Pot-Healer Quotes

“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Failure is valuable...it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night . . . and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won’t come in time. It is too late.’ And he is right; he dies still waiting.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“I got you out of the police barracks the best way I could,” a male voice—the same that Joe had heard on the radio—said. “A strange way,” Joe said. “To you strange. Strange to me have been a number of things you’ve done since the time I first became aware of you.” Joe said, “Like giving away my coins.” “No, I understood that. What strikes me as odd is your having sat for all those months in your work cubicle, waiting.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Tu, in quanto prodotto della tua società socialista, sei abituato a enormi sprechi. Io, tuttavia, sono ancora per la libera impresa. 'Risparmiare è guadagnare...”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Gli aveva insegnato ad odiare sé stesso, e poi, una volta completato l'opera, lo aveva lasciato”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“There is no abstract way of determining the limits of one's force, one's ability to exert effort; it can only be measured in...a task which brings into view the actual, real limitation... Failure will tell me as much about myself as will success.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Each living entity passes through periods of expansion and contraction.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“As a matter of fact he had not. And, thinking it now, he felt the chill of the ocean ease back into its grip around him; the enervating cold plundered his loins, his heart—he felt himself freeze, within, into frightened immobility, like a defenseless minor creature; his fear deprived him of his sense of being human, and of being a man. It was not a man’s fear; it was the fear of a small animal. It shrank him, as if devolving him into ages past; it eradicated the contemporary aspects of his self, his being. God, he thought. I am feeling a fear that is millions of years old.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“All robot servo-mechanisms and all computers are bastards.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“For a time Joe considered. In his mind he considered his room, the cubicle in which he worked, the loss of his coins, the police—he thought about it all and tried to make it add up. What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov's theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit. And nothing more.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“WITH THEM, Joe Fernwright thought, there is not life but merely a synopsis of life. We are a thread that passes through their hands; always in motion, always flowing, we slip by and are never fully grasped. The slipping away is continuous, and carries all of us with it, on and on, toward the dreadful alchemy of the tomb.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“A MAN IS AN angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they—all of them—had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer

“Già suo padre, prima di lui, era stato un guaritore di vasi. E così anche lui guariva vasi, e a dire il vero qualsiasi manufatto di ceramica risalente ai Vecchi Tempi, prima della guerra, quando ancora non tutti gli oggetti erano fatti di plastica. Un vaso di ceramica era una cosa meravigliosa, e ogni vaso che guariva diventava un oggetto che amava, e che non dimenticava mai; la forma, la consistenza della ceramica e lo smalto, restava tutto con lui, per sempre.
Quasi nessuno, tuttavia, aveva bisogno del suo lavoro, dei suoi servizi. Ormai rimanevano pochissimi manufatti di ceramica, e chi li possedeva faceva molta attenzione a che non si rompessero.
Sono Joe Fernwright, si disse. Sono il miglior guaritore di vasi al mondo. Io, Joe Fernwright, sono diverso da tutti gli altri uomini.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer