Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
― Spinoza

“Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.”
― Jim Harrison

“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. ”
― Jim Harrison

“Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”
― John Barth

“All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor