VALIS Quotes

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.