We only rise above mediocrity when there’s something at stake. p. 174.
If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.
As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree.
That princess cannot expect a happy ending who has been rescued by the dragon.
For the person courageous enough to see it out, disorientation always leads to love.
You can hook a rainbow to a goofy vision -Jellybean is doing that- but you can’t hook a rainbow to a lie.
Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child.
There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish.
Girl, I’d warn you that God Almighty’s goin’ to strike you dead, exceptin’ I been warnin’ your mama that for years, and he in his infinite mercy has so far seen fit to withhold his lightnin’.
Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if ’tis sober and severe.
When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.
The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon.
Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between.
Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to all young mammals but are rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has, when it has advanced, not because it was sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, and rebellious, and immature.
Her hair was as straight and red as ironed ketchup. Her astonishingly round breast jiggled ever so slightly, like balls balanced on the noses of Valium eating seals.
She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.
Ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spinal column, and you start to wonder if this would not be the ideal moment to go home, take a hot shower, and curl up with a glass of chardonnay in front of a friendly computer.
Consciousness returned and when it unpacked its bags, there was suspicion in them.
Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It’s a cruel, repetitious bore.
A myth, you ought to know, is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing, and condensing historical events and psychological states that are otherwise too complicated to be digested or appreciated by the prevailing society.
Bandaged in dirty clouds and seeping rabbit milk from a wound in its side, the sun rolls the stone from the tomb of night, to emerge – pale, blinking, but triumphant – into Easter’s yard, somewhere between “Coca-Cola” and “IBMmmm.