Amy Sprague > Amy's Quotes

“. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts

“The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”
― Norman Mailer

“The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other.”
― Norman Mailer

“Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”
― Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

“Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision.”
― Norman Mailer

“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.”
― Norman Mailer

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
― Norman Mailer

“The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”
― Norman Mailer

“I sleep on a tar roof
scream my songs
into lazy floods of stars…
a white powder paddles through blood and heart
and the returns
pure and easy…
This city is on my side.”
― Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems