I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.
He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.
We do not enjoy a story fully at first reading. Not till curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties.
Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
Literature represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede.
I honor the divine on a daily basis, but I want to know that the greatest magick in my life is living authentically with what I have and can do.
Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her back into the cold water of life.
She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths.
When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.
If you think it is spiritual to burn food in front of starving people in hopes that your gods will bring this back to you in triplicate, you are missing the point and sowing animosity from all sides.
I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it.
I once overheard someone telling someone else "Don't confuse kindness with something else." Even though this was not directed at me, I took heed and never hedged my bets.
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
