To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.
She wasn’t trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road – Only wakes upon the sea.
After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.
You live in a beautiful place and you don’t act like you know it.
It seemed altogether right to him that they would drive through the small village of Paradise. It would be hard to find someone less demanding of life than Brown Dog and his current position was beyond his most strenuous ambitions.
What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?
Treasure what you find already in your pocket, friend.
We survive by learning from pain.
The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.
Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.
Pancakes with a slice of ham on top and three eggs on the slice of ham.
I bought a ticket with the last of my money at the bus station, telling the agent that there certainly seemed to be a long, long road winding to the land of my dreams.
Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again.
How can I be lost when I’ve never been found?
Life is short. Why not be familiar with all of it?
Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.
I followed all the rules – man’s and God’s. And you... followed none of them and they all loved you more.
A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven’t quite found the words.