In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise.
Can’t they comprehend that not ever’thing’s done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing ’cause you wanna see how it’ll turn out, ’cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made?
We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde.
Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.
Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for “making poetry” is the same as the verb “to breathe.
Amanda became pregnant during a fierce thunderstorm. “Was it the lightning or the lover?” she was sometimes heard to muse. When her son was born with electrical eyes, people no longer thought her foolish.
My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.
Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder.
And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.
I’ve long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.
What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?” My answer: “Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.
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.