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.
Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.
We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
I join the March for Life in Washington with my prayers. May God help us respect all life, especially the most vulnerable.
Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
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