Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that every individual struggling with addiction is like a recording of their experiences and struggles.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick underscores the idea that individuals grappling with addiction are often trapped in cycles of behavior that replay their struggles, much like a recording that cannot change its content. Each 'junkie' embodies a story of pain, memory, and loss, reminiscent of the struggles that shape their existence, and highlights the need for empathy and understanding towards those facing addiction.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about addiction recovery programs.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "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."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.
Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today your own; but only that, the rest belongs to chance.
You don't cheat anybody out of their experience, whatever it is.
But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: βThis is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and - I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.
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