Sleepingwithink

“...that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig’s point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn’t make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“The most sinister thing about the fall of the Roman Empire was that the people who conquered it never understood that they had done so. They paralyzed the patterns of Roman social structure to a point where everybody just forgot what that structure was. Taxes became uncollectible. Armies composed of hired barbarians stopped receiving pay. Everything just lapsed. The patterns of civilization were forgotten, and a Dark Age settled in.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals