Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up.
The machine conceals the machinations.
We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.
The prisoner is the jailer’s jailer.
For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one’s own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.
There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?
The Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long.
The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.