"The sun went down in honey and the moon came up in wine. The stars were spinnin' dizzy, Lord the band kept us so busy we forgot about the time."
— The Grateful Dead

"But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, look out!"
— Bob Dylan

"Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride/
You will not die, its not poison
-Tombstone Blues"
— Bob Dylan

"The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts"
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..."
— Jack Kerouac

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt"
— Jack Kerouac

"I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet,
concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree
in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that
Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream.
Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright
forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands
and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence
inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson
you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds
long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.
It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do
with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere:
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing.
It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about.
I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression,
they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away?
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence
of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because
it was never born."
Selected Letters 1957-1969 and is a letter he wrote to his first wife, Edie in 1957."
— Jack Kerouac (The Portable Jack Kerouac)

"beautiful insane
in the rain"
— Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)

"As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road: The Original Scroll)

"The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?"
— Jack Kerouac

"Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I'll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth."
— Jack Kerouac

"The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.""
— Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

"Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away."
— Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

"I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!'"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old"
— Jack Kerouac

"- And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony...it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time...Yay, for this, more aloneness' -"
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"(cliches are truisms and all truisms are true)"
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"- 'And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.'"
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me'"
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do' "
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"People who exist at the margins of society are very much like Alice in Wonderland. They are not required to make the tough decision to risk their lives by embarking on an adventure of self-discovery. They have already been thrust beyond the city’s walls that keep ordinary people at a safe distance from the unknown. For at least some outsiders, “alienation” has destroyed traditional presumptions of identity and opened up the mythic hero’s path to the possibility of discovery. What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their “alienation” as a precious gift of freedom from arbitrary norms that they did not make and did not sanction. At the moment a person questions the validity of the rules, the victim is no longer a victim."
— Jamake Highwater (The Mythology of Transgression: Homosexuality As Metaphor)

"Everything is funny, if you can laugh at it."
— the Cat (from alice in wonderland)

"'I am Alice in Wonderland', Josie thought. 'Watch me fall.'"
— Jodi Picoult

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
— The Mad Hatter"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"The good life is never stable, never secure, never easy and never ended. It is a series of steps or stages, one leading into the other and all, in their outcome, adding, not subtracting; augmenting, not diminishing; building, not destroying; creating, not annihilating."
-Scott Nearing, 1965


“To have knowledge is to make it, to construct it,
not to record, absorb, or memorize it.
Teaching is not simply telling.”
(Martin Bickman)


When you choose a word to write, it should mean exactly what it is chosen to mean, neither more nor less.
Alice in Wonderland
"
— Helen and Scott Nearing

"If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does."
— Lewis Carroll

"‘In that direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice
‘You must be’ said the Cat ‘or you wouldn’t have come here’

"
— Lewis Carroll

"Globe and Mail's Top 50 Picks (for personal reference)

1st entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2nd entry: In Search of Lost Time
3rd entry: On the Origin of Species
4th entry: The Divine Comedy
5th entry: The Republic
6th entry: Don Quixote
7th entry: Ulysses
8th entry: Das Kapital
9th entry: The Confessions of St. Augustine
10th entry: Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
11th entry: The Great Gatsby
12th entry: Middlemarch
13th entry: The Wealth of Nations
14th entry: The Interpretation of Dreams
15th entry: Gulliver's Travels
16th entry: One Hundred Years of Solitude
17th entry: King Lear
18th entry: The Critique of Pure Reason
19th entry: Pride and Prejudice
20th entry: The Iliad and The Odyssey
21st entry: The Brothers Karamazov
22nd entry: T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1962
23rd entry: Lolita,
24th entry: The Koran
25th entry: Our Mutual Friend
26th entry: Ficciones
27th entry: The Histories, by Herodotus
28th entry: Moby-Dick
29th entry: Madame Bovary
30th entry: Kafka's The Complete Stories
31st entry: The King James Bible
32nd entry: Principia Mathematica
33rd entry: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
34th entry: Galileo's Dialogue
35th entry: The Theban Trilogy
36th entry: The Mahabharata
37th entry: Alice in Wonderland
38th entry: The Social Contract
39th entry: Essays
40th entry: Faust
41st entry: Silent Spring
42nd entry: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
43rd entry: Anton Chekhov's Stories
44th entry: War and Peace
45th entry: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
46th entry: The Decameron
47th entry: Waiting for Godot
48th entry: The Tale of Genji
49th entry: Diderot's Encyclopedia
50th entry: Portrait of a Lady"
— Globe and Mail

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass)

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then. "
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them."
— Bob Dylan

"Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean."
— Bob Dylan

"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. "
— Bob Dylan

"Gonna change my way of thinking, make my self a different set of rules. Gonna put my good foot forward and stop being influenced by fools."
— Bob Dylan

"Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast"
— Bob Dylan

"You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever."
— Bob Dylan