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.
When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.
Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness--if you had little time left to live--you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you...you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason--or you will never be at all.
By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes,_x000D_ _x000D_ blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, _x000D_ _x000D_ "Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm."
I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work,' because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
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