Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good.
How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding... are simply inauthentic... But there are folks who know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it – and if they never do, they’ll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth or the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth’s sweet gas.
Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.
The clown is a creature of chaos.
Can a woman who does not know the contents of her handbag know the contents of her heart?
Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.
The ones who’re so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having ’auras’ around them, they’re usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor.
Little devils wrestled with little angels in the innermost chambers of my conscience. The devils cheated, of course, although where my conscience was concerned they were also more familiar with the terrain.
Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You’d be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.
When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom – or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference.
Life isn’t simple; it’s overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol.
You can’t rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn’t it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it?
This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.
Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.
Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne.
Isn’t fixity the hallmark of the living dead?
And did I lose my faith in raffles about the same time and for approximately the same reasons that I quit believing that virgins can have babies; or that if I slay only those people the government encourages me to slay, I’ll be allowed to spend all of eternity in some vaguely located puffyland sipping milk and honey with a huzzahing throng of cheery nonthinkers?
Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.
What if the Christ and the Messiah come, and they’re two different guys?