Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what...

…hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create – and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the...

But—let me tell you my cat joke. It’s very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting...

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.

It’s easy to win. Anybody can win.

A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.

you must be an android.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project’s idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy...

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

We’ll fight back, we’ll fight back, we’ll fight back,” a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did...

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...

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about...

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They...

Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place...

Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back.

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

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just – change.With nothing causing it.

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group...

Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large...

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

Let me sleep,” he said, and shut the door; it clicked in her face and she felt animal terror – this was what she feared most in life: the clicking shut of a man’s door...

What was on the other side?”Donna said, “He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it.””He… never went through it?””That’s why he kicked the shit out of everything in his...

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Because 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?...

Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy… fear makes you always, always hold something back.

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...

A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they – all of them – had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and...

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

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

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the...

God’s M.O., he reflected, 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,...

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional...

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...

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray...

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,...

The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst … said about his binges...

Era come se avessi tremato per tutta la vita, a causa di una cronica corrente sotterranea di paura. Tremare, scappare, finire nei guai, perdere le persone che amavo. Come un personaggio dei cartoni animati invece...

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...

I am life,’ the girl said.‘What?’ he said, startled.‘To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re...

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.

This is a mournful discovery.1)Those who agree with you are insane2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head. I’m the one that’s alive. You’re all dead.

We came back [from Mars],” Pris said, “because nobody should have to live there. It wasn’t conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It’s so old. You feel it in the...

To live is to be haunted.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you...