1. “A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves-- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.”
2. “A good orgasm feels like you've left your physical body and been whisked aloft by beautiful valkries to a Valhalla of supra-sensual, intensely emotional extacy amidst a chorus of angels singing with the irresistable purity of the Sirens for your soul feasting on the banquet of lushious incredible sensations of pleasure before you return from your transitory gratification like a feather gently falling on the pillow beside your lover with the echoes of the angels fading in your ears. Then you light a cigarette.”
3. “Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.”
4. “For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it ismmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book adn roust out those facts which seem neccesary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision.”
5. “History is a discipline of aggregate bias. A history may emphasize social events, or cultural or political or economic or scientific or military or agricultural or artistic or philosophical. It may, if it posseses the luxury of volumniosness or the arrogance of superficiality, attempt to palce nearly equal emphasis upon each of these aspects, but there is no proof that a general, inclusive history is any more meanigful than a specialized one. If there is anythign that the writer has learned from Amanda (and he must cofess having learned a mesaure), it is that the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balanced of defined, ill-defined, un-defined,moving, stoppin,dancing, falling, singing, coughinh, gtowing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules-and the spaces in between. So compelx is this stricture, and so foolishly simple, the hostorian's tools will not fir it: they either break off and go dumb in the scholar's hands or else pierce right through the material leaving embarrassing rents difficult to mend. Rule One in the manual of cosmic mechanics: a linear wrench will not turn a spiral bold. Drawing courage from that rule, the author can boast that this approach to history is no worse than any other and probably better than some.”
6. ”Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
7. “I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.”
8. “If little else, the brain is an educational toy.While it may be a frustrating plaything--oen whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them-- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently suprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas Morning. The problem with possesing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some poeple's game, they say you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.”
9. “In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings -- artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers – “to create order. In times sucha s ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite wrenches into the machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.”
10. ”It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
11. “Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthy and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allwoed his religious leaders--often guilt warped, psychopathic misfits--to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos.”
12. “Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.
13. “Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.”
14. “Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.”
15. “Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselevs, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, becaus ethat means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”
16. “The aroma of flowers, from which we have borrowed our perfumes, while extremely powerful, has been from the beginning entirely seductive in its intentions. A rose is a rose is a rogue. Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals. Squeezed from the reproductive glands of plants and creatures, perfume is the smell of creation, a sign dramatically delievered to our senses of the Earth's regenerative powers - a message of hope and a message of pleasure.”
17. “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is the more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.”
18. “The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
19. “There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”
20.“There are other people, peopel who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a life-style. I've found that there is nothign I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support.”
21. "There are three mental states that interest me," said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. "These are: one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy." She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water lily pollen. "Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring."
22. “There is a long-standing argument about whether perfuming is a science or an art. The argument is irrelevant, for at higher levels, science and art are the same. There is ap oint where high science transends the technologic and enters the poetic, ther eis a point where high art transcends technique and enters the poetic.”
23. ”To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
24."To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."
25. ”Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.”
26.”We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
27. “We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we seriously be considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment?”
28.“When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls amoung us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension.”
29.“Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneosly according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and ther eis the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, alrhough to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all.”
