Quotes from A Scanner Darkly ( 1977 )

He wondered when and how they unloaded the fifty-pound bag of Substance D at the Thrifty Pharmacy every morning, from wherever it came from - God knew, maybe from Switzerland or maybe from another planet where some wise race lived.

He felt lousy because he had only three hundred tabs of slow death left in his stash...I only got a week's supply, he thought. What then when I'm out? Shit.

This is getting me nowhere, he realized. I should be out trying to locate someone holding. I've got to get my supply or pretty soon I'll be freaking, and then I won't be able to do anything. Even sit at the curb like I am. I not only won't know who I am, I won't even know where I am , or what's happening.

She had, he thought, lovely large dark warm eyes. Which meant she wasn't on junk.

Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.

Looking at his audience, he realized how much he detested straights.

Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can't destroy their brains; they have none.

A man called up, "How do we stop them, sir?" "Kill the pushers," Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.

.. it didn't make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere.

Life ... was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread farther and farther in the form of neon ooze.

If you had to spy on and report about someone, it might as well be people you'd see anyhow; that was less suspiscious and less of a drag.

Boy, the bubblegummers go downhill fast. We had one in here the other day - she looked fifty. Wispy gray hair, missing teeth, eyes sunk in, arms like pipe cleaners ... We asked her what her age was and she said "Nineteen." We double-checked. "You know how old you look?" this one matron said to her. "Look in the mirror." So she looked in the mirror. She started to cry. I asked her how long she'd been shooting up. "A year," Fred said. "Four months."

What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives?

There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor.

The rich never understand the value of life.

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF. That summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes…

...I'm the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me?

"You shouldn't leave your place unlocked like that," Donna said. "You could get ripped off and it'd be your own fault. Even the giant capitalist insurance companies say that if you leave a door or window unlocked they won't pay..."

In his article, Bogen concluded: 'I believe ... that each of us has two minds in one person.'

Are you getting any cross-chatter? ... Thoughts not your own. As if another person or mind were thinking. But different from the way you would think.…

'How much of what you've got put away did you buy,' he asked, 'and how much did you steal?' 'Buy?' She studied his face uncertainly. 'What do you mean by buy?'

Who the fuck wants to manufacture Coke anyhow when you can rip it off their trucks?

He felt like going out to his car, getting his pistol from the glove compartment, and shooting her face off, bursting her skull and eyes to bits. And then that passed, that hash hate and fury.

'I don't like people to grope my body,' Donna said. ' I have to watch out for that because I do so much coke.'

'You have a habit.' Donna said, 'We all do. You take Substance D. So what? What's the difference now? I'm happy; aren't you happy? I get to come home and smoke high-grade hash every night...it's my trip. Me or my morals. I am what I am. And I get off on hash. It's my life.'

Certain Amanita mushrooms contain four toxins that are red-blood-cell cracking agents. It takes two weeks to die and there's no antidote. It's incalculably painful.

'What is it?'. one staff member said. Donna said, 'A person.' 'Substance D?' She nodded. 'It ate his head. Another loser.' She said to the two of them, 'It's easy to win. Anybody can win.'

In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hard cash.

He said, 'I don't have any more cigarettes.' 'We give each resident one pack a day.' 'Money?' He didn't have any. 'It's without cost. There's never any cost. You paid your cost.'

Motion that is circular is the deadest form of the universe.