Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world.

Some laborers have hard hands, and old sinners have brawny consciences.

Poetic talent is really easy to fake when thy sentences doth no f-king sense make.

We shall not always plant while others reap

The samurais were very interested in Zen because they admired the tremendous precision that the Zen Masters had, their lack of fear and pain and their absolute lack of fear of death.

I came home, the car was in the dining room. "How did you get the car in here?" "Easy, I took a left at the kitchen."

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

Literature is eavesdropping.

Love is the ultimate theme, but it's not just for women.