“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

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“When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.”

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“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside”

from Ubik

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“Noticing her body made him feel like a low-class wind-up toy.”

from Ubik

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“The definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You've erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control.”

from Ubik

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“'I'll sue you,' the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, 'I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.'”

from Ubik

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“Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.”

from Ubik

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“What gods notice, they destroy. Be humble and you will escape the jealousy of the great”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“It's not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It's how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become.”

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“The average American suffers from two delusions, one that God is dead and the other is that there is a difference between brands of cigarettes.”

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“The Taoist oracle called for centuries the I Ching or Book of Changes...A book begun in the 30th century BCE. A book created by the sages of China over a period of 5000 years, winnowed, perfected, that superb cosmology—and science—codified before Europe had even learned to do long division.”

from Man in the High Castle, 1962

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“There is evil. It’s actual like cement… It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“The Tao is that which first lets the light, then the dark; occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. They’re not idealists; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“eventually there will be no life… This is an interval. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“I have a pathetic tendency to unerringly choose the easier of two evils. Like a cow catching sight of the trough; I gallop without premeditation… I go along with the exterior motions because it is safer”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they’re like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They’re clever and can learn, but that is all.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“'Sir, you are offering a fake, an imitation of the authentic'… Akin to primal childhood awakening; facts of life… Synthetic image distilled from hearing assorted talk. Myth implanted subtly in tissue of the brain.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are , ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“The dilemma of civilized man: body mobilized in preparation for panic flight but danger obscure; nothing to see; nothing for body to do. Run? But where to and why? No clue.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“Our defects are so tenuous, so delicate, that we’re hardly able to perceive them. In fact, we have to rise a notch in our evolution to know”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like a concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“We can only control the end by making a choice at each step—obscure admixtures, blends with no proper tool by which to untangle the components—… and we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence, an unfolding process.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. I must not shrink from the clear white light”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“It reflected light. Fire. Not heavy and weary, but pulsing with life—the high realm aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. That is the artist’s job: taking mineral rock from dark silent earth and transforming it into a shining light reflecting from from sky.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“By refusing to face facts… they accelerate the tendency toward greater tour de force adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then desperate solutions… all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless politicians to the top.”

from Man in the High Castle,

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“An elusive and incomparable artist. The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation - this has escaped most critics.”

— Ursula Le Guin 1929 – 2018 CE

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