'The spirit appears so poor that, like a wanderer in the desert who languishes for a simple drink of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment merely the bare feeling of the divine in general. By that which suffices the spirit one can measure the extent of its loss.' --Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of the Spirit, 3.

'How many more decades/ America baby/ Before/ you baste with honey your infernal barbecue?' --Kazuko Shiraishi (tr)

"amore qui cadit tanquam blatta in pelvim" --Laberius (quoted by Rolfe)

"O miseras hominum mentis, o pectora caeca!" --De Rerum Natura II, 14

A critic today is just a drug purity inspector.

Our real definition of "sanity": the ability to make small talk.

Rebirthing. Others kill themselves because they have no metaphors for it. Poets kill themselves because their metaphors are real to them.

Intellectuals beware: groupthink reaches beyond the grave.

Introverts don't have more self knowledge than extraverts--they just have a different definition of the self, no less erroneous.

Gary Snyder, The Real Work (interviews 64-79):

"The true poem is walking that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said. That's the real razor's edge. The poem that falls all the way over into what can be said can still be very exciting, but the farther it is from the razor's edge the less it has of the real magic. ...And then some of them fall too much in the realm of what can't be said. Then they are no longer poems, they are meditation themes like the koan, or they are magical incantations, or they are mantras."

"An education is only valuable if you're willing to give as much time to de-educating yourself as you gave to educating yourself."

Chowka: "You once mentioned an inuitive feeling that hunting might be the origin of zazen..."
Snyder: "...ask why primitive hunters didn't have better tools than they did. The bow of the American Indians didn't draw more than forty pounds; it looked like a toy. ...they hunted with their minds."