In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Dick A Scanner Darkly particular lifestyle motto be happy now tomorrow dying begins at once happiness memory

Consider also:

  1. “A sacred secret. We shall not die. The reflections shall leave And it will happen fast. We shall all be changed, and by that he means reversed back, suddenly. In the twinkling of an eye! Because, he thought glumly as he watched the police psychologists writing their conclusions and signing them, we are fucking backward right now, I guess, every one of us; everyone and every damn thing, and distance, and even time. But how long, he thought, when a print is being made, a contact print, when the photographer discovers he’s got the negative reversed, how long does it take to flip it? To reverse it again so it’s like it’s supposed to be? A fraction of a second. I understand, he thought, what that passage in the Bible means, Through a glass darkly.”
  2. “Did our ancestors go peeping about with dark lanterns, and do we walk at our ease in broad sunshine? Where is the manifestation of our light? By what symptoms do you recognise it? What are its signs, its tokens, its symptoms, its symbols, its categories, its conditions? What is it, and why? How, where, when is it to be seen, felt, and understood? What do we see by it which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing?”
  3. “This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear the most.”
  4. “You may say the question aloud,” Hawthorne said. “We have no secrets here.”
  5. Spin Angels