You know, I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.
As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little “terraced” houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road – it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined.
You can twist perception, reality won’t budge.
I watched a storm pass to the north, trailing veils of dark rain.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand.
Big ring around moon, three or four days from full. Rain coming? Big wave every 10 seconds, sometimes like distant explosion, booming sub-bass.
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion; you must set yourself on fire.
We can walk our road together if our goals are all the same. We can run alone and free if we pursue a different aim. Let the truth of Love be lighted. Let the love of truth shine clear. Sensibility armed with sense and liberty with the Heart and Mind united in a single perfect sphere.
Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
While I remained ambitious, punctual, and hedonistic at home, I had learned to better appreciate the timeless beauties and blessings of nature, to value sincerity as a cardinal virtue and reject the Western reverence for affectation and hypocrisy, and to make my frantic life pause for sunrises, sunsets, and full moons.
Whatever is left behind in the passing of a rare talent, so much is always lost.
I remember thinking, “How does anyone survive something like this? And if they do, what kind of person comes out the other end?” I didn’t know, but throughout that dark time of grief, sorrow, desolation, and complete despair, something in me seemed determined to carry on. Something would come up.
Another feature on the new bikes was something I never thought I cared about – cruise control.
All these wounds that I can’t get unwound.
The songs he chose reflected that same withdrawn, private man, but this man had the gift of expressing his inner soulscape through the medium of some of the 20th century’s finest songwriters, from Rodgers and Hart to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Jimmy Webb, and as always, making those songs his own.
I saw that it was plain wrong to evaluate people according to race, for it was clear that culture was the real divider among peoples.
Few people associate words like serenity and tranquility with motorcycling, but some of us discover those mind-states by motoring along on our own two wheels, out in the weather and part of the scenery, on quiet roads of our choosing.
Spiritual yearnings are natural to many people, and may give them solace or hope, but extremists of any stripe are not content with faith as armor; they must forge it into a sword.
The only reason I am alive is because I could not die.
That’s not hunting,” I wrote, “that’s just shooting.