“...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it s in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...”
“God impressed me with this a long time ago: Roddy, I will never do anything through you until I have done it to you! . ~R. Alan Woods [1998]”
“...don t settle for pap - our thoughts wander through eternity - experience the wonder of being alive...”
“Strange how something good can come from something horrible.”
“Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn t happen right away.”
“Through adversity, not only are we given an opportunity to discover our inner strength, we are also given the gift of foresight so we can shine a light for others who go through the experience after us.”
“I believe in me. And my family does. And Mrs. V. It s the rest of the world I m not so sure of.”
“In my limited realm of experience, beginnings led to endings.”
“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane, he [Ed Ricketts] said. And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this, Ed said. Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.”
“My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a private being which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the private being if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the possible , it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even apotheosis of nonsense. But I don t attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can t believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate. ~George Bataille, Inner Experience pg. 42”
“Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it? That s because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced.”
“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.”
“Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ s terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?”
“As for me... I m fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.”
“I m sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.”
“Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.”
“Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. [...] - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.”