She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.
Interpretation
The speaker acknowledges that one person actively shapes their life while he passively experiences it.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick reflects on the contrast between two approaches to life: active participation versus passive observation. The realization that someone else 'makes life over' suggests that they have agency and control over their circumstances, while the speaker recognizes his own inaction, leading to a life that simply unfolds rather than being crafted.
In practice
During a motivational speech about taking charge of one's life, this quote highlights the importance of personal agency.
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.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
Even though the money is great and the fame is great, you still have a lot of disenfranchised young men that are participating in the NFL that are not very happy. A lot of them are very bitter. A lot them are very angry. So many of them have had no fathers and no home life, and basically, no education.
It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.
Learn to respect this sacred moment of birth, as fragile, as fleeting, as elusive as dawn.
We can't plan life. All we can do is be available for it.
Even if you're happy with the life you've chosen, you're still curious about the other options.
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