- "Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
- "We artists are indestructable, even in a prison cell or concentration camp I would be almighty in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
- "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
- "Love is the cure, for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.”
- "Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces."
- "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
- "Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
- "For the greater part human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing."
- "The greater part of most people's thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose. Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you. The statement 'I think' implies volition. It implies that you have a say in the matter, that there is a choice involved in your part. For most people, this is not the case. 'I think' is just as false a statement as 'I digest' or 'I circulate my blood.' Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens."
- "Indeed, people speak sometimes about the 'animal' cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."
- "To hold a pen is to be at war."
- "Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamor of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
- "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."
- "I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.'"
- “I want to spend the time I have doing things that make my heart rage.”
- "One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
- "I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool."
- "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness."
- "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."
- "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
- "'But would that not anger the gods?' Kudra asked. 'Ha ha ha!' The laughter burst out of Pan like the barking of some obscene dog. 'Anger the gods? The gods, those that art still around, wouldst congratulate thee for finally catching on.' 'You mean...?' 'I mean that the gods do not limit men. Men limit men.'"
- "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."
- "When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."
- "Those who have put out peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness."
- "We are poised mid-way between the atoms and the stars."
- "The hunter kills the wolf only in the stories that humans tell. Beasts have their own tales to weave. We are not men, disguised as mere dogs. We are wolves, disguised as men."
- "I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which come to me as blossom, goes on as fruit."
- "If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."
- "Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."
- “If you’re not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you’re not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you’re wasting your day.”
- "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."
- “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
- "A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."
- "If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
- "I love contradiction because I find tremendous honesty in the incommensurable."
- "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
- "If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents: outlearn them, outlive them, and know more than they do."
- "What we need are books that hit us like most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presense, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us."
- "The effect of automobiles on romance would be hard to overstate."
- "Chess is particularly the game of the unappreciated, who seek in play that success which life has denied them."
- "The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."
- "The longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize something is fucked up. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resumé of a supreme being. This is the kinda shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude."
- "Public education in the United States has been placed in the unenviable position of serving the dichotomous and often mutually exclusive roles of preserving traditional values while promulgating desirable social evolution."
- "I'd like to learn a new language: Scottish. It's a mixture of English and alcohol. You drink a pint and end each sentence with 'you bastard.'"
- "A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left."
- "I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats."
- "The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, 'seeing that his work was good.'"
- "Sustainability is like teenage sex; everyone says they’re doing it, but not as many people really are, and those who are, aren't doing it well."
- "When was the last time you wanted to say it all to the right person? To have it all come out right, to surprise yourself at how together you could be. When was the last time you ever met someone who made you want to give it all to them? I mean give yourself to them. Where you couldn't express yourself enough - like you wanted to cut off one of your arms to be understood. That's it - you would cut your head off to have someone understand you. You know how pointless that one is. You know how many times you've smashed yourself to bits on the rocks."
- "You'll find, my friend, that in the gutters of this floating world, much of the trash consists of fallen flowers."
- "By the same token, our adulation of 'real men' may be a long overdue consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which has by now removed the raison d'être for traditional masculinity by making physical differences between the sexes totally irrelevant for almost every kind of work. Mechanization has emancipated gender roles from biological sex and, incidentally, made men as a gender largely superfluous in peacetime."
- On his death bed, he was asked to renounce Satan and said, "This is no time to be making a new enemy".
- "The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform."
- "To steal a book is an elegant offense."
- "That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience."
- "We have this idea that love is supposed to last forever. But love isn't like that. It's a free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases. Sometimes it stays for life; other times it stays for a second, a day, a month, or a year. So don't fear love when it comes simply because it makes you vulnerable. But don't be surprised when it leaves, either. Just be glad you had the opportunity to experience it."
- "Anger, intelligence, and wit are ultimately more seductive than zero percent body fat."
- "Never ask the authorities for permission -- it takes up too much of your time."
- "Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering."
jul 28 2009 ∞
may 28 2010 +