"I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City."

~ Jack Kerouac ...

“You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish,
it’s just that you're scared silly, frightened of life,
of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order.

But everything is disorder, dear boy.
Vegetable, mineral and animal,
all disorder, and so is the multitude
of human races, the life of man,
thought, history, wars, inventions,
business and the arts,
and all theories, passions
and systems.

It’s always been that way…

What are you looking for?
There is no Truth.
There's only action, action obeying
a million different impulses,
ephemeral action, action subjected
to every possible and imaginable
Contingency and contradiction.

Life.

Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,
stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes,
piles of corpses.

What can you do about it, my poor friend?

-- Blaise Cendrars ...

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.”

― Tom Waits

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”

—Alan Moore

“Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”

—Omar Khayyam ...

“A life, whose purpose
is money, is death.”

― Albert Camus ...

“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

-- Aldous Huxley ...

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."

-- Susan Sontag ...

“We are lonely people, and we try to enrich our poverty-stricken minds with a great deal of knowledge, information and facts. The mind is not capable of deep inquiry if it is filled with knowledge.”

— Krishnamurti ...

“All things are already said; but since no one is listening, you always have to start over.”

~ Andre Gide ...

"In waves of creeping dread, I look around as we're sucked into a grinding whirlpool of early-morning traffic, the scenery converted into an eternal rattling swarm of horn-blaring, jittery jalopies, all different hues of speckled rust and dust and decay, darting between rumbling, lumbering trucks and buses packed with dull-faced masses of doomed, eternally damned sinners."

~ Jonathon Shaw ...

"To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes 'beyond the facts' in these familiar and natural ways."

- Iris Murdoch

"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."

~ Ernest Hemingway

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”

–Guy Debord

“Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.”

—Byung-Chul Han ...

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

― Carson McCullers ...

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

—D.H. Lawrence ...

“This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism – nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.”

— Heidegger ...

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”

― Soren Kierkegaard