In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Life isn’t stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice. As...

The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to...

Science gives man what he needs.But magic gives him what he wants.

There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a...

But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One...

If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.

…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of...

Well, history isn’t ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second – happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending...

You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become...

It is easier to play around with a man’s wife than with his cliches.

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...

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical...

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs...

There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo’s journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears’ basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator,...

If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.

It’s more important to be free than to be happy.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the...

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

Who knows how to make love stay?1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will...

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts used cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic...

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who...

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the...

Whining’s unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen strawberries with a silver fork.

We’ve got something for just about everyone. I think our horsemen and our fans are going to be tickled with what we have to offer.

Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this Semitic deity was reputed to be jealous (what was there to be jealous of if there...

Conversation between a princess and an outlaw: “If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait–dragon bait–what do you stand for?””Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in...

Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer’s love.Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires...

the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love

When life demands more of people than they demand of life – as is ordinarily the case – what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death

But do we know how to make love stay?’I can’t even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.

They’re the perfect crime.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough,...

Don’t confuse symmetry with balance.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at...

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats …

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.Camus clearly got up on...

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred...