John Irving once told me he doesn’t start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, ‘My God, Irving, isn’t that like working in a factory?’
Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello.
Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn’t been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth.
It is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism.
He said, ‘The perfect taco.’ That’s it, those were his last words. He sighed, ‘Ahhh,’ and said, ‘The perfect taco.
In Bokonon, it is written that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
Plants and animals are even more comfortable with death. It is the natural end. But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. The moon’s a mess, to tell the truth. A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars. Every loose rock in our solar system has taken a punch at it. It’s been scorched, golf-clubbed, and inflicted with boils. If lovers have chosen this brutalized derelict, this tortured dustball, this pitted and pimpled parcel of wasteland as the repository of their dreams, the moon can’t help it.
Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, be, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her.
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.