Philip K. Dick Quotes

Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around.

The sparrow still falls.

By Fate full many a heart has been undone, And many a sprightly rose made woe-begone; Plume thee not on thy lusty youth and strength: Full many a bud is blasted ere its bloom.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

Life and death are matters of the God. I can be killed even at home.

God, to prevent all escape, hath sown the seeds of death in our very constitution and nature, so that we can as soon run from ourselves, as run from death. We need no feller to come with a hand of violence and hew us down; there is in the tree a worm, which grows out of its own substance, that will destroy it; so in us, those infirmities of nature that will bring us down to the dust.

Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.... The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.... [F]ace to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. ...I am ready But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!

Love, sex, food, friendship, art, play, beauty and the simple pleasure of a cup of tea are all well and good, but never forget that God/the universe is determined to kill you by whatever means necessary.

There is something tenderly appropriate in the serene death of the old. Nothing is more touching than the death of the young, the strong.

You are human and mortal; we are the sum of our weak moments and our strong.

It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all.

Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass.

I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit.

Life is an incurable disease.

Being dead is being weak and walled off.

I may have won the only important lotto ever, which is life, but I am still going to die. We all are.

I hate Sridevi. I hate her for making me realise that she, too, is finally only just a human being. I hate that her heart, too, has to beat to live.

When I cannot stand alone, it will be time to die.

Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life-- A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, Death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon When a man will take my life in battle too-- flinging a spear perhaps Or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.

All of us are like locks. No matter how strong the bolt, there’s always a key out there that opens it.

Whatever lives is granted breath But by the grace and sufferance of Death.

This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.