Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.

Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.

The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.

The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

The king dead is a living god.

Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.

I prayed for death so as not to live in madness.

The bee that hath honey in her mouth hath a sting in her tail.

Every time we see people as ordinary, we turn the wine back into water.

If your Nerve, deny you - Go above your Nerve

Discrimination involves reflection and absorption.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

I gravitate towards places where humans have been and are no more, to the edge of man's influence, where the elements are taking over or covering man's traces.

The strength of any plan depends on the time. Circumstances and things eternally shift and change.

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person.