"The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one
devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish
abyss lurks beneath."

~Peter Wessel Zapffe

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in
people taking themselves too seriously...Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept
that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way
lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

~ Tom Robbins

“Millions of people around the world are watching the headlines these days, and
most of them are getting the Fear. Good news is out of the question in this
brutal year of our Lord. This is the time of the Final Shit Rain.”

— Hunter S. Thompson

"What threatens us today is fear. .. Our danger is the forces in the world today
which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul,
trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass."

—William Faulkner

“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

The great Wendell Berry died yesterday. This one stings. He’s always been one of
my favorite writers.

“Though the body grows old and bears
the ache and weight of many days,
the life by which it lives is young,
for life is young or it does not
exist, is not even dead. And so
as I walk in the land’s holy Sabbath
Under the tall trees, I come
at once into the old young joy
that has moved me all my life to be
here in the early morning light.”

—Wendell Berry

"Breathe with unconditional breath  
the unconditioned air.  
Shun electric wire.  
Communicate slowly. Live  
a three-dimensioned life;  
stay away from screens.  
Stay away from anything  
that obscures the place it is in.  
There are no unsacred places;  
there are only sacred places  
and desecrated places."

-- Wendell Berry

“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human
obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s
most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other
lives.”

~ Wendell Berry

"As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most
needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can
do without, and of how to get along without it."

~ Wendell Berry

"The human soul is an abyss of viscous darkness, a well whose depths are rarely
plumbed from the surface of the world. No one would love themselves if they
really knew themselves and thus, without vanity, which is the life blood of the
spirit, our soul would die of anaemia."

-- Fernando Pessoa

"Jack London drinking his life away while
writing of strange and heroic men.
Eugene O’Neill drinking himself oblivious
while writing his dark and poetic
works.

now our moderns
lecture at universities
in tie and suit,
the little boys soberly studious,
the little girls with glazed eyes
looking
up,
the lawns so green, the books so dull,
the life so dying of
thirst."

~ Charles Bukowski

I started out with nothing
and I still got most
of it left.

~ Tom Waits