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.
I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
We're all trying to get to the same island β whether you swim, fly, surf, or skydive, it doesn't matter. What matters is when the red light goes on.
Nothing changed in my life since I work all the time," Pamuk said then. "I've spent 30 years writing fiction. For the first 10 years I worried about money and no one asked me how much money I made. The second decade I spent money and no one was asking me about that. And I've spent the last 10 years with everyone expecting to hear how I spend the money, which I will not do.
Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized.
but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.
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