Dick Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Dick. Here they are! All 100 of them:

β€œ
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more?
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Chris Rock
β€œ
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
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Philip K. Dick (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon)
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I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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Scoot over, man. I don't like you that much." "Dick. That's not what you said last night." "Bite me.
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Rachel Caine (Glass Houses (The Morganville Vampires, #1))
β€œ
I'm not much but I'm all I have.
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Philip K. Dick (Martian Time-Slip)
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THINGS YOU NEVER HEAR: 'Please stop sucking my dick or I'll call the police.
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George Carlin (Brain Droppings)
β€œ
Wil Wheaton Says: Don't be a dick.
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Wil Wheaton
β€œ
My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
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It is not down on any map; true places never are.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
β€œ
Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.
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Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
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As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
β€œ
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
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Philip K. Dick
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The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
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Philip K. Dick
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The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
Reality denied comes back to haunt.
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Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said)
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Everything in life is just for a while.
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Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
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I try all things, I achieve what I can.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report? Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes." Calvin: Academia, here I come!
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Bill Watterson (Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat (Calvin and Hobbes, #9))
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You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
β€œ
In my opinion, the only good spider is a dead spider, and women's rights aren't worth dick if they mean I can't ask a man to do my bug squashing.
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Janet Evanovich (One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, #1))
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Ignorance is the parent of fear.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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Babe, advice. A man expresses his gratitude, you do not throw attitude. You kiss him and, maybe, suck his dick to show your appreciation.
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Kristen Ashley (Motorcycle Man (Dream Man, #4))
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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.
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Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
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The two men stared at each other. Assumptions were made, judgments rendered, dicks measured.
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Jennifer Estep (Spider's Bite (Elemental Assassin, #1))
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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God, he even knew their names. Rhage. Phury. And that scary-ass Zsadist guy. Yeah, no Tom, Dick, and Harry names for the vampire types. But come on, could you actually imagine some lethal bloodsucker named Howard? Eugene?
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J.R. Ward (Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1))
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There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)
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Hey, I have a suggestion, why not put a condom over your head – if you’re going to act like a complete dick then it makes sense to dress like one.
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Suzanne Wright (Feral Sins (The Phoenix Pack, #1))
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Axel Reid, you wake up right now!” I yell. β€œGet your paws off my tit and call your dick off its search for my pussy, he found it asshole, now back off.
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Harper Sloan (Axel (Corps Security, #1))
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These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten): 1. Share everything. 2. Play fair. 3. Don't hit people. 4. Put things back where you found them. 5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS. 6. Don't take things that aren't yours. 7. Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody. 8. Wash your hands before you eat. 9. Flush. 10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. 11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some. 12. Take a nap every afternoon. 13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. 14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. 15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we. 16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.
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Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
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Stop staring at my dick," he growled. Oh, yes it was definitely an illusion. "Barrons loved me staring at his dick,"I informed it. "he would have been happy if I'd stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection.
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Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
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Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.
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Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
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...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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Tell me something,boys. Do you wear that leather to turn each other on? I mean, is it a dick thing with you all?
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J.R. Ward (Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1))
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You should take note that simply because a girl makes your dick hard, that doesn't mean you have to go shove it inside her.
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Colleen Hoover (Maybe Someday (Maybe, #1))
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I'm traveling 90 kilometers per day as usual, but I only get 37 kilometers closer to Schiaparelli because Pythagoras is a dick.
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Andy Weir (The Martian)
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Big dick energy is gender-neutral
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Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
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Now you listen here, mister,” I said, trying for a more adult tone. β€œI’m not going to spend every night listening to you try to crash you girl’s head through my wall with the force of your dick alone!
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Alice Clayton (Wallbanger (Cocktail, #1))
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Jesus Christ… Thank fuck for that,” Picnic said. β€œNope, not Jesus, just a man,” Horse whispered. β€œAlthough when women see my dick for the first time, they’ve been known to fall down on their knees and worship me.
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Joanna Wylde (Reaper's Property (Reapers MC, #1))
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No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.
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Philip K. Dick (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
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Call me Ishmael.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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Garrett: Allie's gonna crash in my room. Garrett: Your dick can stay in your room.
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Elle Kennedy (The Score (Off-Campus, #3))
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You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are.
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Matthew Dicks (Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend)
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Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.
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Philip K. Dick
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This is a mournful discovery. 1)Those who agree with you are insane 2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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Somebody always had to pay, and he was glad it was not going to be him. Meanwhile he had managed to ruin the perfect marriage by turning Dick into a crayfish and making Rachael think that he had run off with another woman.
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Max Nowaz (Get Rich or Get Lucky)
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Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
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Philip K. Dick
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Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.
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Philip K. Dick (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
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You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
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Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
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Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
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Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.
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Philip K. Dick
β€œ
She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said. "How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked. She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading! "I don't know," she said, shrugging.
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Eleanor Brown (The Weird Sisters)
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Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them.
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Dick Francis (To the Hilt)
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A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
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Philip K. Dick
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Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.
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Philip K. Dick
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Do you realize that all great literature β€” "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" β€” are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.
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Philip K. Dick
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There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.
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Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
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It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.
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Philip K. Dick
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Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick oder Der Wal)
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See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
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His forehead dropped to touch mine. β€œI’m gonna piss you off β€˜cause I can be a dick. That’s who I am. And you’re gonna piss me off β€˜cause, babe, you got attitude. That’s who you are. And that’s who we’re comin’ out to be together. And I’m all right with that because, with what I had before, even when you’re a bitch, I like it. But when you’re not, it’s a sweetness the like I’ve never tasted.
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Kristen Ashley (Sweet Dreams (Colorado Mountain, #2))
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I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.
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Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life)
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To live is to be haunted.
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Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said)
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The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
β€œ
It isn't that it's too soon, you're on the back of my bike, it ain't too soon. You can buy sheets. You cannot install blinds." "um..." I mumbled. "Can you explain the difference?" "Sheets are chick territory," he said without delay. "You gotta use tools, that's dick territory." "Oh," I whispered. "Don't tread on dick territory," he advised. "So, um... is a paintbrush a tool?" I asked cautiously. "If you're paintin' the side of the house, yeah. If you're painting mud colored paint in a room, no." "It's terracotta," I said softly. "Whatever," he muttered, his mouth twitching. "Or, the paint chip called it Mexican horizon. The blue is dawn sky." "Definitely chick territory," Tate replied, losing the fight with his grin. "What about...pictures for the walls?" I asked. "Chick," he answered instantly. "Um...could I ask that, instead of you getting angry and being a jerk, maybe you give me a head's up when I'm doing something stupid?
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Kristen Ashley (Sweet Dreams (Colorado Mountain, #2))
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I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're 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't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
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This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...
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Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4))
β€œ
Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
β€œ
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
β€œ
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
β€œ
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
β€œ
If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.
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Leah Raeder (Black Iris)
β€œ
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
β€œ
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.
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Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said)
β€œ
What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
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Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
β€œ
To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
β€œ
Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
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Roberto BolaΓ±o (2666)
β€œ
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.
”
”
Philip K. Dick
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The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
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Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
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I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them. Burning on my left hip: petticoat. And near it, my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. I remember feeling that word, heavy and slightly sticky across my pubic bone. My mother's steak knife. Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself. Pouring bleach over the knife and sneaking through the kitchen to return it. Wicked. Relief. The rest of the day, I spent ministering to my wound. Dig into the curves of W with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip. Pet my cheek until the sting went away. Lotion. Bandage. Repeat.
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Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects)
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But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
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George Carlin