I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, “I wish I had known this some time ago.
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.
I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.
Don’t wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.
Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.’ Sam held out his hand. “Give me some tobacco and a paper.
Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
There’s no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?””Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.
The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown….To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three.
I’m very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar.
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?
Once past the comfort zone in either direction, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse.
I’m very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I’m a liar.
Wheels turning, the motorcycle’s roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.
The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.
You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.
But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday—those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies!
Life is full of doors that don’t open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don’t want them to.
Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.
First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it.
In a world of physical ease, brutal social equality, and reasonable economic equality, exclusiveness in frivolity becomes the most sought-after of all distinctions.
Do you work for the government, any government?””I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.
In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay…
Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.
The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.
If someone asks you why you’re oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can’t be a meeting of minds.