“Appalachia. Appalachia ... Good God I lived there, in the northern fringe, on a little sub-marginal farm in western Pennsylvania, for the first eighteen years of my life.

Eighteen years. Good God.

Finally rescued by Hitler and the war (The war), the draft, the United States Army, God bless them all.

Otherwise, who knows, I might still be there driving a coal truck for the strippers, or teaching English to sullen delinquents with TV-shriveled minds in some grimy small-town high school, or even — God, the soul curls to think of it — traipsing the Appalachian Trail from end to end, for fun! for recreation! for re-creation!”

— Edward Abbey

We live in a political world
Under the microscope
You could travel anywhere
and hang yourself there
You've always got more
than enough rope

We live in a political world
Turning and a-thrashing about
As soon as you're awake,
you're trained to take
What looks like the
easy way out

— Bob Dylan

“All my life I’ve liked weeds.
Weeds are botanical
poets, largely unwanted.
You can’t make a dollar
off them.”

-- Jim Harrison

“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.”

― Schopenhauer

“I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance... Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right.”

—Samuel Beckett

“After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth?
What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count.
I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.”

— Douglas Coupland

“It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a robot, and incapable of love he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of; and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street, they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.”

~ D. H. Lawrence

"We want life. And we want the power of life. We want to feel the power of life in ourselves. We're sick of being soft, and amiable, and harmless. We're sick to death of even enjoying ourselves. We're a bit ashamed of our own existence. Or if we aren't we ought to be. But what then?"
-- D.H. Lawrence

“The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.”

--Chuang Tzu

Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer," the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

—Andrei Tarkovsky

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”

—Albert Camus

"It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind.

If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed."

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Not ignorance, but ignorance
of ignorance is the death
of knowledge.”

― Alfred North Whitehead

“The whole modern world is at war with the nature of man, and it calls this war ‘progress.’ It breaks the tools of the soul and then wonders why the soul no longer works.”

— G. K. Chesterton

‘The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.’

– D. H. Lawrence

“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.”

~ Georgia O’Keeffe

Everywhere I go is beauty,
trees illuminated
street lights glowing in the darkness
I want to run up to strangers and kiss them
but there is too much noise
men kill each other
I’m sick and tired of seeing sad faces
stop that bastard machine
everyone is God and Holy
a spike is ripping at my throat
I smell a fragrance of a rose
everywhere I go is beauty.

~ Jack Micheline

Thoreau has a message to all the longevity-obsessed hypochondriacs out there.

“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”

― David Lynch

"We civilized people are all in a state of conflict, constantly struggling to harmonize the opposing demands of culture and nature, of ego and body, of duty and pleasure. For all of us the struggle is painful, and for some of us it is hell...

With people, it is a general rule that the more elaborate the facade, the greater is the inner emptiness."

-- Dr. Alexander Lowen