'I am so Them, I am He.'
DZK, March, 2002, talking to Greg
'If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.'
Emerson M. Pugh
'...my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there I am, in truth.'
R.H. Ash in A.S. Byatt's "Possession"
'And is love then more
Than the kick galvanic
Or the thundering roar
Of Ash volcanic
Belched from some crater
Of earth-fire within?
Are we automata
Or Angel-kin?'
R.H. Ash in A.S. Byatt's "Possession"
'Agricultural labor, this endless plucking of weeds and plowing of fields, had always seemed to him the essence of futility; after sixty years he was coming to realize that all work, legal or medical or, like his own, financial, was also a Sisyphean matter of recycling, of pushing inert and thankless matter back and forth, of turning over (in his case) the profoundly rich compost of corporate debt.'
John Updike
Short Easter
'Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable to him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually ... He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.'
Robert M. Persig
Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
'We can measure everything except those things that are worth measuring.'
Robert Kennedy
'What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
'A shiver passed from her spine into the web of her back. She thought of endless children, coarsened into workers, adults, adulterated, seduced, tamed; something in her rebelled at the beauty of their voices, furious at the inevitability of it all: Even the trees would someday die, even the sun would gnaw away at itself and bow away to the dark.'
Jere Cunningham
The Abyss
'You don't fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water.'
Howard Gossage
'All things are good, but they are not good for every person nor right for all times.'
Hazrat Inayat Khan
'If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible.'
Talmud, Berakhot 6
'If puppies could talk
What happy frolics today
Bark: "hey, I love you!"'
DZK, Sept., 1999
'...So proud of my weakness? Why must I live in a cage like a criminal defying and hating, I who love peace and friendship? Why was I born without a skin? Oh God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or be touched?'
Eugene O'Neill
The Great God Brown
'Some...have abandoned the past. They have decided that it matters not if they were rich or poor, educated or ignorant, proud or humble, in love or empty-hearted – no more than it matters how a soft wind gets into their hair. Such people look you directly in the eye and grip your hand firmly. Such people walk with the limber stride of their youth. Such people have learned to live in a world without memory.'
Alan Lightman
Einstein's Dreams
'We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.'
Thomas Edison
'No thought is born in me that does not have death carved in it.'
Michelangelo
'I'm agnostic, for Christ's sake.'
Robinson Kelly, December 1997
'It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm.'
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
'Would that I could drink of your skin. Even as I have drunk of your sight. Would that I could suckle each tender limb of your body. Would that I could consume you, and in doing so be also consumed. To have placed possession of every fibre of you, to burn and be quenched and burn again. I would be a sailor also upon the rivers of your mind and be lost only in the seeing of you. I would be a diver in your depths, both cold and warm would I dive them. Naked and swift I would explore them. Would that I could be all that I am and have been and still be a voyageur, intent only upon the continent of thyself.'
Melissa Dent, January 1990
After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open,
With a the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And learn to build all your roads
On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have
A way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn that even sunshine
Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate
Your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth.
And you learn and learn...
With every goodbye you learn.
Melissa Dent, 1998
'Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson