- “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
- “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”
- “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”
- “We all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.”
- “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.”
- “We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
- “There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.”
- “So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”
- “Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”
- “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
- “There are only two mantras: yum and yuck. Mine is yum.”
- “You’ve heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well? It’d go like this: You’d get the boss on the line and say, “Listen, I’ve been sick ever since I started working here, but today I’m well and I won’t be in anymore.” Call in well.”
- “You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one’s life. So you lose it, you go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey ’til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That’s not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s clichés.”
- “People are never perfect, but love can be.”
- “The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens — but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it’s love and love alone that really matters.”
- “There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.”
- “To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
- “Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”
- “Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!”
- “Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.”
- “Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is – and still not caring.”
- “Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”
- “If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.”
- “Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.”
- “The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”
- “Something has got to hold it together. I’m saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.”
- “Don’t trust anybody who’d rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.”
- “You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”
- “It doesn’t matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you’re not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren’t connected, aren’t working together harmoniously, well, you’re just hopping through life on one leg.”
- “We’re making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”
- “Despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”
- “Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.”
- “What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.”
- “Growing up is a trap. When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.”
- “Sure, a lot o’ rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o’ poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”
- “Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.”
- “They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they’re getting is philosophy.”
- “People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”
- “I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth,’ she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn’t have any ends. Columbus fixed that.”
- “Salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation. I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.”
- “The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can’t see the ball.”
