Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Quotes

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“To live is to be haunted.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back. You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Why is love so good...? You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and you say "What's happening?" and they say, "I got a better offer someplace else," and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you're dead you're carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won't make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad.
A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Ruth said, "Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"-she paused, reflecting-"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and denying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Flow my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled forever let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Ruth said, "Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"-she paused, reflecting-"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“No rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wavelength”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it – grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said.

“You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you're always involved with strangers.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Consciousness of unconsciousness”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of the earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back.

He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven't I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“She sighed. "Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That's what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“You shouldn't be frightened so easily. Or life is going to be too much for you.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“But look at the aspirations of that rabbit and look at his failing. A little life trying. And all the time it was hopeless. But the rabbit didn't know that. Or maybe did know and kept trying anyhow. But I think he didn't understand. He just wanted to do it so badly. It was his whole life, because he loved the cats.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“It seemed to him as if he sat behind the tiller of his custom-made unique quibble, facing a red light, green light, amber light all at once; no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes. Operating out of the drear depths of the collective unconscious which joined him and her—and everyone else—together. In a knot which never could be undone, as long as they lived.
No wonder, he thought, some people, many people, long for death.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“As you go to your grave your mouth will be still open, asking the question, “What did I do?” You will be buried that way: with your mouth still open. And I could never explain it to you, Buckman thought. Except to say: don’t come to the attention of the authorities. Don’t ever interest us. Don’t make us want to know more about you.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“you’re not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven’t I learned that by now, if I’ve learned anything?”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said.