The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I ...
I’m very careful with political statements. When I bash the Republicans, I know I’ll piss off about half the people. That’s why I also bash the Democrats, so I can piss off the other half of the population too.
Two one-armed people might seem perfect for each other, but what if they’re both missing the same arm? Then even something simple like holding hands while walking becomes a case of they’re too similar to see themselves really going anywhere as a ...
As Ernest Becker observes in The Denial of Death, the very thought of disobeying authority appears to awaken the anxiety connected with the possible loss, during infancy, of parental love, respect or support. The unexamined beliefs and experiences th...
The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of s...
Dreams set the bar for what we hope and expect out of life; they ultimately become incredibly accurate predictors of who we will eventually become. Dream big and you will achieve big things. Dream small and expect small results. It is not that big dr...
The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism. Sausages may taste lovely, but it'...
I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he st...
Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her story...
In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other ...
We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man ...
Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was re...
A muffled voice startled them both. "When are you going to her?" They pulled away. In the ballroom windows, noses and hands pressed against the glass, were the girls. They stood among the prickly rosebushes, beaming wicked little grins. Delphinium an...
By embracing your subconscious, you gain a different way of seeing and experiencing—an expanded perception that opens a doorway, not only to lucid dreams, but also to the mythic dimension. As in lucid dreams, you see yourself or others with new eye...
The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to d...
There was another reason why I wasn't ready to tell you all this that night in the airport." "What other reason?" "Guess what today is?" "Um, Tuesday?" "Even better. It comes around once every four years. Last day of February? Ringing any bells?" He ...
I had to stop linking every single thing that happened to me with Kennedy. Realization dawned then, that he was still my default. Over the past three years, we’d become each other’s habit. And though he’d broken his habit of me when he walked a...
Clear Awareness is not a magical state to be attained by secret rituals, chants, pleading to some external source or emergence into astral planes, nor a status bestowed by a certified master. Nor is it a capability of yours that needs to be developed...
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they...
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers...
Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation--all expenses paid--wherever he wanted to go. Any place in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . ....
