Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against en...emies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-developm...ent, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such ba...d taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and ...female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors preci...sely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess... a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I loved, but woman fell away; I hid me from her faded fame.... I snatched the sun's eternal ray And wrote till earth was but a name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »