The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

You know the truth, the brick-hard, irregular, slithery surface of truth.

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.

Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood. What's dead in there still looks out. It's not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there's still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking; it can't stop looking.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.

In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they'll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

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

The drive of unliving things is stronger than the drive of living things.

The most dangerous kind of person ... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn't give a shit.

It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth--not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze.

For each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him ... 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. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.

Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, [one] ... slipped by degrees into madness.

God's M.O. ... is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.

God can be good and terrible--not in succession--but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the 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.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.

Activity does not necessarily mean life.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

It's easy to win. Anybody can win.

PHILIP K. DICK, A Scanner Darkly

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

PHILIP K. DICK, attributed, Small Molecule Therapeutics for Schizophrenia

Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

PHILIP K. DICK, Paycheck and Other Classic Stories

Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings. Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimage there. Our natures will be going there, too.

PHILIP K. DICK, "The Android and the Human"

That took more than ordinary dullness, the kind of stupidity that can only result from long practice and hard study.

PHILIP K. DICK & RAY NELSON, The Ganymede Takeover

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.

PHILIP K. DICK, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you ... ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherancy, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.