William Shaw > Quotes

“They are usually asking quite ordinary questions, like why am I here, why are some people rich and others poor, what happens when I die, why doesn’t anybody like me, and so on. The real question is, how come they’re coming up with such weird answers?”
― William Shaw, Spying in Guru Land: A Journey into the Strange World of Religious Cults

“Later the FBI would talk of ‘bunkers’ built under the compound.”
― William Shaw, Spying in Guru Land: A Journey into the Strange World of Religious Cults

“In the Hare Krishna movement, everything Indian acquires a holiness. Many disciples not only adopt the clothes, but adopt a sort of odd body language too. Spurning the plastic spoons offered, they scoop up their prasadam with their fingers, and thank the servers with palms pressed together. Some even acquire twitchy pseudo-Indian neck movements.”
― William Shaw, Spying in Guru Land: A Journey into the Strange World of Religious Cults

“When, on his first day here, he had told the gallery director he was an artist too, he had smiled thinly. ‘How nice.’ The conventional art world was a fortress that built clean white walls around itself to protect the favoured few. It was uninterested in people who hadn’t come up through the system.”
― William Shaw, Deadland

“Under so much here today, under the loud, smiling professions of love and purity, simmers a rage. I have been cheated. Everything I know is wrong.”
― William Shaw, Spying in Guru Land: A Journey into the Strange World of Religious Cults