We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
Often, moreover, it is…that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.
…disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business….
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true.
The Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.
But do we know how to make love stay?’I can’t even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn’t bother to wipe its boots.
If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.
salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.
You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.
It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.
You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning ’til dee sun come up.
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.
No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell’s Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
They accepted my donation, so they’re aware they’d better serve my interests or I’ll buy some leadership that will.
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.
A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.
Some marriages are made in heaven,Mine was made in Hong Kong, by the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.
…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.
All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.
Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.
If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.
Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown…The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations the leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines.
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it andpush it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before,push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm ofmagic.
Logic only gives man what he needs,” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.
Science gives man what he needs.But magic gives him what he wants.
There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It’s no coincidence we call them ‘deadlines.
There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.
And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks
Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.
Is that man’s fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?
That’s the value of the artist… Even when they aren’t aware, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.
If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.
One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.
Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it’s going
Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love
If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin’.
There’s no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.
If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.
You’ve remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what’s more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven’t been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else’s life-war.
In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance – and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done.
Something has got to hold it together. I’m saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.
The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.
Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.
But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.
We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.
Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.
The trickster’s function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.