The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills.
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.
Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things.
The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.
Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist.
Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.
How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.
Oh, Marx,′ Amanda sighed. ‘You’re so melodramatic. So what if it’s this way or that way? When I was in convent school I used to stare out the windows at the clouds. I used to chase butterflies in the Mother Superior’s flower patch. Those clouds and those butterflies, they didn’t know secular from religious – and they didn’t care.’ ‘I’m neither a cloud nor a butterlfy,’ I snapped. ‘We’re all the same as clouds and butterflies. We just pretend to be something different.
In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization!
Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody.
When I was younger, before this layoff which has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since.
I love myself,” he said. “But it’s unrequited.
To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.
A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation.
Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched.
The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs.
The whole universe is a complex of rhythms,” mused Amanda. “We each of us feel a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos. The sea is the grand agency of rhythm. The grain-tops in the wind, the atoms that orbit are rhythmic. The uterus, which is a strong muscular organ, contracts with the birth of a baby – the rhythmic contractions, in fact, are the important motivations for the baby to emerge into the world. Rhythm is how it all begins.
As you are surely aware, our planet is turning on its axis around and around in space. It turns slowly, however, making one complete rotation only every twenty-four hours; and that’s a good thing – isn’t it? – because if our world turned as fast as Gracie’s room appeared to be turning, the sun would be either rising or setting every fifteen minutes, astronomers would be as woozy as rodeo clowns, and it’d be nearly impossible to keep our meatballs from rolling out of our spaghetti.
I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I’ll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.
The only normal people are the ones you don’t know well yet.