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We Should Take Mothers In High Seas And Drown Them There, They Are As Poisonous As Lead In The Air.
-Philip K. Dick
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We Should Take Mothers

Philip K. Dick
...
We Should Take Mothers In High Seas And Drown Them There, They Are As Poisonous As Lead In The Air.

Understanding the Quote: "we should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they..."

This quote by Philip K. Dick reflects deeply on the theme of mother. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Mother, Air, Sea, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Philip K. Dick interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick is celebrated for insightful thoughts on mother and air. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Mother
Air
Sea
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The Painting Showed A Hairless, Oppressed Creature With A Head Like An Inverted Pear, Its Hands Clapped In Horror To Its Ears, Its Mouth Open In A Vast, Soundless Scream. Twisted Ripples Of The Creature's Torment, Echoes Of Its Cry, Flooded Out Into The Air Surrounding It; The Man Or Woman, Whichever It Was, Had Become Contained By Its Own Howl. It Had Covered Its Ears Against Its Own Sound. The Creature Stood On A Bridge And No One Else Was Present; The Creature Screamed In Isolation. Cut Off By - Or Despite - Its Outcry.
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Odd That The Brain Could Function On Its Own, Without Acquainting Him With Its Purposes, Its Reasons. But The Brain Was An Organ, Like The Spleen, Heart, Kidneys. And They Went About Their Private Activities. So Why Not The Brain?
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There Exists, For Everyone, A Sentence - A Series Of Words - That Has The Power To Destroy You. Another Sentence Exists, Another Series Of Words, That Could Heal You. If You're Lucky You Will Get The Second, But You Can Be Certain Of Getting The First.
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Giving
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Moments
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Insanity - To Have To Construct A Picture Of One's Life, By Making Inquiries Of Others.
Insanity
Inquiry
Constructs
When I Believe, I Am Crazy. When I Don’t Believe, I Suffer Psychotic Depression.
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Believe
Suffering
I Want To Write About People I Love, And Put Them Into A Fictional World Spun Out Of My Own Mind, Not The World We Actually Have, Because The World We Actually Have Does Not Meet My Standards.
Writing
People
Mind
Either I've Invented A Whole New Logic Or, Ahem, I'm Not Playing With A Full Deck.
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Logic
Deck
Amazed, Fat Said, "she's Decomposing And Yet She's Still Giving Birth?" "only To Monsters," Dr. Stone Said.
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Stones
Monsters
I Was Twelve When I Read My First Sf Magazine
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Two
People
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Defeated
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Giving Me A A New Idea Is Like Handing A Cretin A Gun, But I Do Thank You Anyhow, Bang Bang.
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Giving
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Lying
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And Of Course, In My Writing, There Is The Constant Theme Of Music, Love Of, Preoccupation With, Music. Music Is The Single Thread Making My Life Into A Coherency.
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Music Love
Preoccupation
I'm Tired And I Want To Rest; I Want To Get Out Of This And Go Lie Down Somewhere, Off Where It's Dark And No One Speaks. Forever.
Lying
Tired
Dark
The Pain, So Unexpected And Undeserved, Had For Some Reason Cleared Away The Cobwebs. I Realized I Didn’t Hate The Cabinet Door, I Hated My Life… My House, My Family, My Backyard, My Power Mower. Nothing Would Ever Change; Nothing New Could Ever Be Expected. It Had To End, And It Did. Now In The Dark World Where I Dwell, Ugly Things, And Surprising Things, And Sometimes Little Wondrous Things, Spill Out In Me Constantly, And I Can Count On Nothing.
Pain
Hate
Dark
Activity Does Not Necessarily Mean Life. Quasars Are Active. And A Monk Meditating Is Not Inanimate.
Mean
Doe
Monk
My Major Preoccupation Is The Question, 'what Is Reality ?' Many Of My Stories And Novels Deal With Psychotic States Or Drug-induced States By Which I Can Present The Concept Of A Multiverse Rather Than A Universe. Music And Sociology Are Themes In My Novels, Also Radical Political Trends; In Particular I've Written About Fascism And My Fear Of It.
Reality
Political
Drug
I Became Educated To The Fact That The Greatest Pain Does Not Come Zooming Down From A Distant Planet, But From The Depths Of The Heart. Of Course, Both Could Happen; Your Wife And Child Could Leave You, And You Could Be Sitting Alone In Your Empty House With Nothing To Live For, And In Addition The Martians Could Bore Through The Roof And Get You.
Pain
Children
Heart
Science Fiction Writers, I Am Sorry To Say, Really Do Not Know Anything. We Can't Talk About Science, Because Our Knowledge Of It Is Limited And Unofficial, And Usually Our Fiction Is Dreadful.
Sorry
Writing
Fiction
This, To Me, Is The Ultimately Heroic Trait Of Ordinary People; They Say No To The Tyrant And They Calmly Take The Consequences Of This Resistance.
Tyrants
People
Resistance
The Tragedy In His Life Already Existed. To Love An Atmospheric Spirit. That Was The Real Sorrow. Hopelessness Itself. Nowhere On The Printed Page, Nowhere In The Annals Of Man, Would Her Name Appear: No Local Habitation, No Name. There Are Girls Like That, He Thought, And Those You Love Most, The Ones Where There Is No Hope Because It Has Eluded You At The Very Moment You Close Your Hands Around It.
Love
Girl
Real
Why Is Love So Good...? You Love Someone And They Leave. They Come Home One Day And You Say "what's Happening?" And They Say, "i Got A Better Offer Someplace Else," And There They Go, Out Of Your Life Forever, And After That Until You're Dead You're Carrying Around This Huge Hunk Of Love With No One To Give It To. And If You Do Find Someone To Give It To, The Same Thing Happens All Over.
Home
Giving
Forever
Don't Try To Solve Serious Matters In The Middle Of The Night.
Depression
Good Night
Insomnia
The Odd Thing In This World Is That An Eager-beaver Type, With No Original Ideas, Who Mimes Those In Authority Above Him Right To The Last Twist Of Necktie And Scrape Of Chin, Always Gets Noticed. Gets Selected. Rises.
Ideas
Twists
Odd Things
I Want To Write About People I Love, And Put Them Into A Fictional World Spun Out Of My Own Mind, Not The World We Actually Have, Because The World We Actually Have Does Not Meet My Standards. Okay, So I Should Revise My Standards; I'm Out Of Step. I Should Yield To Reality. I Have Never Yielded To Reality. That's What Sf Is All About. If You Wish To Yield To Reality, Go Read Philip Roth; Read The New York Literary Establishment Mainstream Bestselling Writers
New York
Writing
Reality
The Inanity Of Her Remark Infuriated Him. 'good Grief Don't You Understand Janet? At This Point I'm Thoroughly Delusional. I'm As Mentally Ill As It's Possible To Be. It's Incredible That I Can Communicate With You At All. It's A Credit To My Ego-strength That I'm Not At This Point Totally Autistic.
Grief
Ego
Credit
In A Nutshell-i Fear Authority But At The Same Time I Resent It-the Authority And My Own Fear. So I Rebel.
Rebel
Authority
Resent
Grief Causes You To Leave Yourself. You Step Outside Your Narrow Little Pelt. And You Can’t Feel Grief Unless You’ve Had Love Before It - Grief Is The Final Outcome Of Love, Because It’s Love Lost. […] It’s The Cycle Of Love Completed: To Love, To Lose, To Feel Grief, To Leave, And Then To Love Again. Grief Is The Awareness That You Will Have To Be Alone, And There Is Nothing Beyond That Because Being Alone Is The Ultimate Final Destiny Of Each Individual Living Creature. That’s What Death Is, The Great Loneliness.
Lost Love
Loneliness
Grief
Those Who Refused To Respond To The New Stimulus Would Perish. Adapt Or Perish.
Statistics
Stimulus
He Started Keeping A Journal - Had Been, In Fact, Secretly Doing So For Some Time: The Furtive Act Of A Deranged Person.
Facts
Deranged
Persons
Whom The Gods Notice They Destroy.
Because Today We Live In A Society In Which Spurious Realities Are Manufactured By The Media, By Governments, By Big Corporations, By Religious Groups, Political Groups... So I Ask, In My Writing, What Is Real? Because Unceasingly We Are Bombarded With Pseudo-realities Manufactured By Very Sophisticated People Using Very Sophisticated Electronic Mechanisms. I Do Not Distrust Their Motives; I Distrust Their Power. They Have A Lot Of It. And It Is An Astonishing Power: That Of Creating Whole Universes, Universes Of The Mind. I Ought To Know. I Do The Same Thing.
Religious
Real
Writing
Reality Is That Which, When You Stop Believing In It, Doesn't Go Away.
Atheist
Real
Believe
Everything Is True,' He Said. 'everything Anybody Has Ever Thought.' 'will You Be All Right?' 'i'll Be All Right,' He Said, And Thought, And I'm Going To Die. Both Those Are True, Too.
Said
Dies
In A One-party System There Is Always A Landslide.
Party
Landslides
In One Of The Most Brilliant Papers In The English Language Hume Made It Clear That What We Speak Of As 'causality' Is Nothing More Than The Phenomenon Of Repetition. When We Mix Sulphur With Saltpeter And Charcoal We Always Get Gunpowder. This Is True Of Every Event Subsumed By A Causal Law In Other Words, Everything Which Can Be Called Scientific Knowledge. "it Is Custom Which Rules ," Hume Said, And In That One Sentence Undermined Both Science And Philosophy .
Philosophy
Law
Gunpowder
Don't Never Participate In No Bad Scenes, He Reminded Himself; That Was His Motto In Life.
Motto
Scene
Men And The World Are Mutually Toxic To Each Other.
Men
Toxic
World
Perhaps If You Know You Are Insane Then You Are Not Insane. Or You Are Becoming Sane, Finally.
Insane
Becoming
Knows
How Much Of What We Call 'reality' Is Actually Out There Or Rather Within Our Own Head?
Reality
Statistics
I'd Like To See You Move Up To The Goat Class, Where I Think You Belong.
Moving
Thinking
Class
I Guess That's The Story Of Life: What You Most Fear Never Happens, But What You Most Yearn For Never Happens Either. This Is The Difference Between Life And Fiction. I Suppose It's A Good Trade-off. But I'm Not Sure.
Differences
Fiction
Stories
It Is Sometimes An Appropriate Response To Reality To Go Insane.
Inspirational
Life
Reality
The Trouble With Being Educated Is That It Takes A Long Time; It Uses Up The Better Part Of Your Life And When You Are Finished What You Know Is That You Would Have Benefited More By Going Into Banking.
Education
Humorous
Learning
I, For One, Bet On Science As Helping Us. I Have Yet To See How It Fundamentally Endangers Us, Even With The H-bomb Lurking About. Science Has Given Us More Lives Than It Has Taken; We Must Remember That.
Taken
Bombs
Helping
There Are No Private Lives. This A Most Important Aspect Of Modern Life. That One Of The Biggest Transformations We Have Seen In Human Life In Our Society Is The Diminution Of The Sphere Of The Private. That We Must Reasonably Now All Regard The Fact That There Are No Secrets And Nothing Is Private. Everything Is Public.
Secret
Important
Modern Life
The Psychotic Does Not Merely Think He Sees Four Blue Bivalves With Floppy Wings Wandering Up The Wall; He Does See Them. An Hallucination Is Not, Strictly Speaking, Manufactured In The Brain; It Is Received By The Brain, Like Any 'real' Sense Datum, And The Patient Act In Response To This To-him-very-real Perception Of Reality In As Logical A Way As We Do To Our Sense Data. In Any Way To Suppose He Only 'thinks He Sees It' Is To Misunderstand Totally The Experience Of Psychosis.
Wall
Real
Thinking
But As He Plodded Along A Vague And Almost Hallucinatory Pall Hazed Over His Mind; He Found Himself At One Point, With No Notion Of How It Could Be, A Step From An Almost Certain Fatal Cliffside Fall—falling Humiliatingly And Helplessly, He Thought; On And On, With No One Even To Witness It. Here There Existed No One To Record His Or Anyone Else's Degradation, And Any Courage Or Pride Which Might Manifest Itself Here At The End Would Go Unmarked: The Dead Stones, The Dust-stricken Weeds Dry And Dying, Perceived Nothing, Recollected Nothing, About Him Or Themselves.
Weed
Fall
Pride
Where There's Dope, There's Hope!
Dope
Well, I Hate To Admit It, But It Is Possible That There Is (one) Such A Thing As Telepathy And (two) That The Ceti Project's Idea That We Might Communicate With Extraterrestrial Beings Via Telepathy Is Possibly A Reasonable Idea--if Telepathy Exists And If Etis Exist. Otherwise We Are Trying To Communicate With Someone Who Doesn't Exist With A System Which Doesn't Work.
Hate
Ideas
Two
He Sat Watching The People Go By, Wondering How A Thing Of This Sort Could Have Come About, I Must Have Let Myself Get Mixed Up In Something Horrible, He Thought ... Probably She's The One Who Did It; I Have No Control Of Myself Or Anything That's Happened. So Now I'm Waking Up. I'm Awake, He Thought ... I've Been Destroyed And Now That I'm Awake All I Can Do Is Realize It ... The Shock Of Getting Up There And Telling That Account Made Me See. Mixture Of Lies And Bits Of Truth. Woven Together. Unable To See Where Each Starts.
Lying
People
Together
The Only Real Failure Is To Fail Others.
Real
Failure
Failing
I Love You,' Rachael Said. 'if I Entered A Room And Found A Sofa Covered With Your Hide I'd Score Very High On The Voigt-kampff Test.
Love You
Tests
Rooms
I Am Ubik. Before The Universe Was, I Am. I Made The Suns. I Made The Worlds. I Created The Lives And The Places They Inhabit; I Move Them Here, I Put Them There. They Go As I Say, Then Do As I Tell Them. I Am The Word And My Name Is Never Spoken, The Name Which No One Knows. I Am Called Ubik, But That Is Not My Name. I Am. I Shall Always Be.
Moving
Names
World
In A Society Of Criminals, The Innocent Man Goes To Jail.
Men
Innocent Man
Jail
We Do Not Have An Ideal World, Such As We Would Like, Where Morality Is Easy Because Cognition Is Easy. Where One Can Do Right With No Effort Because He Can Detect The Obvious.
Effort
World
Cognition
Reality Is Just A Point Of View.
Reality
Views
Point Of View
Maybe Each Human Being Lives In A Unique World, A Private World Different From Those Inhabited And Experienced By All Other Humans. . . If Reality Differs From Person To Person, Can We Speak Of Reality Singular, Or Shouldn't We Really Be Talking About Plural Realities? And If There Are Plural Realities, Are Some More True (more Real) Than Others?
Real
Unique
Talking
I Started Reading Sf When I Was About Twelve And I Read All I Could, So Any Author Who Was Writing About That Time, I Read. But There's No Doubt Who Got Me Off Originally And That Was A. E. Van Vogt.
Reading
Writing
Doubt
Each Of Us Assumes Everyone Else Knows What He Is Doing. They All Assume We Know What We Are Doing. We Don't.
Assuming
Knows
Reality Denied Comes Back To Haunt.
Reality
Psychology
Denied
The Wisest People Are The Clowns, Like Harpo Marx, Who Would Not Speak. If I Could Have Anything I Want I Would Like God To Listen To What Harpo Was Not Saying, And Understand Why Harpo Would Not Talk.
Wisdom
People
Want
Sometimes One Must Try Anything, It Is No Disgrace. On The Contrary, It Is A Sign Of Wisdom.
Trying
Statistics
Sometimes
Empathy, He Once Had Decided, Must Be Limited To Herbivores Or Anyhow Omnivores Who Could Depart From A Meat Diet. Because,ultimately, The Empathic Gift Blurred The Boundaries Between Hunter And Victim, Between The Successful And The Defeated.
Successful
Empathy
Meat
Then It Is In Me, Too, The Psychotic Streak. A Psychotic World We Live In. The Madmen Are In Power. How Long Have We Known This? Faced This? And-how Many Of Us Do Know It? ... Perhaps If You Know You Are Insane Then You Are Not Insane. Or You Are Becoming Sane, Finally. Waking Up. I Suppose Only A Few Are Aware Of All This. Isolated Persons Here And There. But The Broad Masses-what Do They Think? All These Hundreds Of Thousands In This City, Here. Do They Imagine That They Live In A Sane World? Or Do They Guess, Glimpse, The Truth...?
Depression
Thinking
Cities
He Entered The Elevator And Together They Moved Closer To God
Together
Elevators
Moved
The Real Origin Of Science Fiction Lay In The Seventeeth-century Novels Of Exploration In Fabulous Lands. Therefore Jules Verne's Story Of Travel To The Moon Is Not Science Fiction Because They Go By Rocket But Because Of Where They Go. It Would Be As Much Science Fiction If They Went By Rubber Band.
Real
Moon
Land
She Makes Life Over, He Realized. She Controls Life, Whereas I Just Sit On My Can And Let It Happen To Me.
Lifestyle
Happens
What Constitutes The Authentic Human Being?
Humans
Human Beings
I Am A Reader. I Am A Writer. People Assume I Do These Things To Escape. You Couldn't Be More Right. I'm Escaping A World I Don't Like. A World I Have No Control In. In This World, I Am Nothing. I Am A Color, A Height, A Weight, A Number. But In The World Of Books And Writing, I Am Amazing. I Am Powerful. I Am Different. People Are Better. Worlds Are Endless. Change Is Possible. Life Is Manageable.
Powerful
Book
Writing
Strange How Paranoia Can Link Up With Reality Now And Then.
Reality
Links
Strange
So We And Our Elaborately Evolving Computers May Meet Each Other Halfway. Someday A Human Being, Named Perhaps Fred White, May Shoot A Robot Named Pete Something-or-other, Which Has Come Out Of A General Electric Factory, And To His Surprise See It Weep And Bleed. And The Dying Robot May Shoot Back And, To Its Surprise, See A Wisp Of Gray Smoke Arise From The Electric Pump That It Supposed Was Mr. White's Beating Heart. It Would Be Rather A Great Moment Of Truth For Both Of Them.
Heart
White
Dying
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