Philip K. Dick

Consciousness of unconsciousness

It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

There is evil! It's actual, like cement.I can't believe it. I can't stand it.Evil is not a view ... it's an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.

I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the very end of the struggle you've made no progress at all. That upon discovering that, you've raised to a lofty moral height, and you've accepted your fate, and somehow went on.

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works.

We didn't have sense enough to take care of it. Now it's torn. And the artist is dead.

It isn't a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I'll tell you what it is: it's the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance . . . to find new things . . . to expand. To spread out, reach areas, experiences, comprehend and live in an evolving fashion. To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on . . .

The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.

Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It's a big business, I am told.

You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer.""Did he show you slides?"We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can__ feel grief unless you__e had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it__ love lost. [_] It__ 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__ what death is, the great loneliness.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

It's easy to win. Anybody can win.

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you__e depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don__ care. Apathy, because you__e lost a sense of worth.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And - how many of us do know it?

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.