Dan > Dan's Quotes

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”
― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“If you make enough noise, no matter your instrument, you can keep the old gods alive forever.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.”
― Steven Moffat

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“Let us consider a sad illumination. The Manhattan office worker moves througha clutter of factory-made, anonymous furniture to a plastic, impersonal kitchen, tobreakfast on canned, packaged anonymous food-fuel; dresses hirself in theanonymous-city-dweller costume, travels through dark tunnels of sooty metal andgray concrete to a dark metal room, foul with polluted air. All day s/he deals withsymbols that have no relevance to hir divine possibilities. This person issurrounded by the dreary, impersonal, assembly-line, mass-produced, anonymousenvironment of an automated robot, which perfectly mirrors hir “turned off’awareness.

When this person “turns on,” s/he sees at once the horror of hir surroundings. Ifs/he “tunes in,” s/he begins to change hir movements and hir surroundings sothat they become more in harmony with hir internal beauty. If everyone inManhattan were to “turn on” and “tune in,” grass would grow on First Avenueand tieless, shoeless divinities would dance or roller-skate down the carlessstreets. Ecological consciousness would emerge within 25 years. Fish would swimin a clear-blue Hudson.”
― Timothy Leary, Your Brain Is God

“Moorcock believes, like Arthur Brown, that when art takes on the function of myth, it can actually transform consciousness: “I believe that the artist is a shaman, in that you provide your public (tribe) with images, resonances, stories which symbolise their relationship with the physical world and its questions.”
― Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

“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, Alice in Wonderland

“Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddharta