Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
16 quotes
"Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete."
"There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters"
"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."
"Maybe I shouldn’t have told you––about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.“No," Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather––“ He became silent. “I’d prefer to know."
"What about -- not sex -- but love?''Love is another name for sex.''Like love of country,' Rick said. 'Love of music."
"Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer 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."
"The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist."
"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."
"I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android."
"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."
"Mankind needs more empathy."
"An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for."“Then,” Miss Luft said, “you must be an android."
"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization."
"Yet, the dark fire waned: the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it - could never have reconciled itself to."
"I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.(Mercer)"
"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 where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come."