“Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”
“Country music is the poetry of the American spirit.”
“The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against God - De Sade, Byron s Manfred , Schiller s Robbers , Goethe s Faust , Hoffmann s mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the spirits decided to make a planned and consistent effort at communication ? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.”
“Das Misstrauen gegen den Geist ist Misstrauen gegen den Menschen selbst, ist Mangel an Selbstvertrauen.”
“The simple truth is that love is a part of who we are, not something that others give to us if we re worthy of it. We re taught that if we just find that right person, and that person falls in love with us, everything will be fine. We re not taught about recognizing the love that is a part of our spirits, the love that we radiate when we recognize the beauty and need in all the people that surround us. Love is ours to share, at all moments and in all situations, but for some reason we fear doing so.”
“No one s life made sense on paper. You cannot condense a person into facts.”
“When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.”
“In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.”
“It s a shame, when I m at the checkout line, and the cashier holds up my bill to the light, in search for a ghost president, or slashing a yellow marker to see if counterfeit. Even in money we can t be trusted. Makes we wonder whats next, will the government make a marker to slash our hand, or an x-ray we will have to walk through, to check if we have a dishonest heart or corrupt spirit?”
“…(my father) would say nothing, And I could not find a silence Among the one hundred Chinese silences That would fit the one he created Even though I was the one Who had just made up the business Of the one hundred Chinese silences- The Silence of the Night Boat. And the Silence of the Lotus, Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell Only deeper and softer…”
“Life will be better when we start to enjoy it”
“When we change our thoughts, we will change our experiences.”
“How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.”
“For I m afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don t mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you ve got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can t bear it, and you die.”
“But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.”