Ashley Lande > Quotes

“The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I'd grown myself.”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“An addicts brain engages in all manner of acrobatics to justify her idol.”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“Psychedelics, at best, could never do more than airlift me to the tenuous and swaying peak of the tower of Babel, an unsound piecemeal stack of children's blocks, of man's spurious attempts reach heaven. Jesus and Jesus alone can lead us into the true
kingdom, the one that never perishes, the one that satisfies and gives us more than we could have ever asked or imagined, the one where our tearful, anxious questions, like mine on that final mushroom trip --'Does anything mean anything at all?' — are answered conclusively, and abundantly, and in greater affirmative measure than we could have ever hoped. (p. 261)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“Taking a powerful drug with someone I'd just met seems like a reasonable thing to do after my Hitchens disillusionment. (p.51)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“But beneath it all loitered that gnawing doubt that Hitchens had inadvertently sewn within me: that tenacious desire for something beyond materialism, a desire that was sometimes nothing more than a whisper and sometimes a gripping, consuming yen that had eclipsed all else and compelled one to seek all manner of earthly pleasures in futilely trying to satiate it. Could this be the last thing, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, as I'd later write?”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“I shut God Is Not Great halfway through and stared at the yellow cover, now garish and embarrassing in its boldness. I was - what was I? Disappointed. Bereft. Disgusted, even. I slid the book underneath my bed, where I wouldn't have to look at it and thus further consider my confusion. For perhaps the first time since I'd so confidently declared myself an atheist to my shocked parents, the hard dome of my determined irreligiosity suffered a fissure -- minute, barely perceptible, but relentlessly niggling, like the pea beneath a tottering stack of mattresses... I let Hitchens abide with the eddies of dog hair and dust under my bed, relegated to the dark margin where I never swept... (p.42,43)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“But beneath it all loitered that gnawing doubt that Hitchens had inadvertently sewn within me: that tenacious desire for something beyond materialism, a desire that was sometimes nothing more than a whisper and sometimes a gripping, consuming in that had eclipsed all else and compelled one to seek all manner of earthly pleasures in futilely trying to satiate it. Could this be the last thing, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, as I'd later write? (p.52)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“Atheism had disappointed, but it's alternatives appealed even less. (p.51,52)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ