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may the jaws of death have cotton teeth.”
“Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat;
how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?”
Pan had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked.
“But what if,” asked Kudra, shooting Alobar a meaningful glance, “but what if we decided now to choose life?”
Pan
Arkadia
the gold-dust twins, Christianity and Commerce, had set up their crooked wheel of fortune.
“Aging seems a high price to pay for normalcy.”
“It is rather perplexing talking to someone you cannot see.” “Nonsense,” said Alobar. “Thousands of Christians do it every day. At least this god will talk back to you.”
Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”
Reincarnation was simply a fantasy your Hindu perpetuated to keep his rigid reality model from drivin' him mad.
we know that the brain remains electrically alive for up to thirty minutes after the heart and other vital organs have ceased to function. So these 'heavenly' experiences o' the temporarily dead may be merely an archetypal drama unfolding upon the stage o' departin' consciousness, a farewell performance of a powerful mythological allegory. And when the brain turns the juice off a half-hour later, boom, the curtain falls once and for all; the show is over, and there's no waitin' up for the reviews. Ultimate solitude. As for the light, well, all o' matter is condensed light. We came from light,
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People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits.
Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits.
“If you have to ask, you'll never know.")
“The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”
At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.
