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We Can Build You

Philip K. Dick

Top 10 Best Quotes

“And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It's fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear: much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.”

“I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.”

“We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.”

“I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.”

“Hell,' I said, 'love is an American cult. We take it too seriously; it's practically a national religion.”

“the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It's fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear; much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.”

“When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid.' 'I should think so' I said. 'I am afraid, sir, and wonder to see myself here rather than there. For there is no reason why I should be here rather than then' 'Did you come to any conclusion?' The Stanton cleared its throat, then got out a folded linen handkerchief and carefully blew its nose. 'It seems to me that time must move in strange jumps, passing over intervening epochs. But why it would do that, or even how, I do not know. At a certain point the mind cannot fathom anything further.”

“God, what a dreadful thing - the truth.”

“And," my dad concluded, calming down a little, "all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man's little and can't fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him.”

“That's why their lives are worse than ours; they can't give up and die - they have to go on.”

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Book Keywords:

epigraph, detachment, humanity, human, quip, witty, time, death, pkd, truth, life, scifi, perdido-street-station, spiders

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