Gary > Gary's Quotes

“Mindfulness isn't necessarily about awakening within. Awakening wisdom teaches me how my exterior and interior life are not separate. What happens in the world is happening within me, and vice versa.”
― Gary Gach, Pause, Breathe, Smile: Awakening Mindfulness When Meditation Is Not Enough

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“Take karma, make dharma.”
― Gary Gach

“Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.”
― GOETHE JOHANN WOLFGANG VON

“A drop of pond water
under the microscope
just like in science class
but now your are the pond
& the microscope is mindfulness”
― Stephen Levine, Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace

“The poet is stepping out of the airplane. ”
― Jack Spicer

“WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“See how weak prose is.... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.”
― Jack Spicer

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“A simple separate person is not contained between his hat and his boots.”
― Walt Whitman

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. ”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
”
― Jack Spicer

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart”
― Helen Keller

“Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?”
― Jack Spicer

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The good news is that we are Buddha.
The bad news is that all beings are Buddha.
The sickness of being human is the sickness of wanting to be unique.”
― Albert Low

“parallel lines meet in eternity
parallel lives meet for tea”
― Gary Gach

“I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions...”
― Julio Cortazar

“Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.”
― Shakyamuni

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
― Helen Keller

“A human being is like a television set with millions of channels.... We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to recover our own sovereignty.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Desert which is immense and from above light brown or red vast rivulets of sand with no human life. As the only land. What land is. Running alongside it and then forward is the deep blue Red Sea — with the edges of the land in very light turquoise blue rim, it is the rim. A very beautiful rim. The people are in the air. There are patches of sand in, as it goes in, the endless sea, the very light turquoise rimmed. So it could be sky, which has white rainless clouds. In the sky or it could be in the sea.

Whatever is darker as shadows could be just in the air. Only in the air. Sand patches, rimmed or with the very light blue shallower sea. But only if one's there.”
― Leslie Scalapino, The Return of Painting, the Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy

“This is the place of places and and it is here.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world - to pronounce it -- and to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye.”
― Morris Graves

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.

- 1959, from a catalogue”
― Robert Rauschenberg

“My first memory is of light -- the brightness of light -- light all around.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“I do not paint in front of but from within nature.”
― Arshile Gorky

“By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents”
― Aristotle