Matt > Matt's Quotes

“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“While I am alive, I intend to live. (Everett Ruess to his friend Bill, Mar 9, 1931, p 31)”
― W.L. Rusho, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty & Wilderness Journals

“Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34)”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Americans . . . are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“It's a small world." . . . "When you put it in a cemetery it is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“The unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“In this world, you get what you pay for.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.”
― N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn

“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”
― Dave Eggers, What Is the What

“HAPPENING APART FROM WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND IT There is a vividness to eleven years of love because it is over. A clarity of Greece now because I live in Manhattan or New England. If what is happening is part of what’s going on around what’s occurring, it is impossible to know what is truly happening. If love is part of the passion, part of the fine food or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not clear what the love is. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me. The stillness I did not notice until the sound of water falling made apparent the silence I had been hearing long before. I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman’s heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don’t have a name for.”
― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert

“A person needs new experiences. It jars something deep inside, allowing them to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
― Duke Leto Atreides