There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.
Interpretation
The quote highlights finding beauty and meaning in unexpected places, showcasing the artistry in everyday life.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick reflects on an experience where he perceives beauty in seemingly insignificant elements of life, such as trash and debris in alleys. His sharpened vision allows him to see a hidden visual language within the chaos, suggesting that beauty can be found in the overlooked and mundane aspects of existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about finding creativity in urban settings during an art seminar.
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.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
It's easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care - that is a false assumption.
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
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