Keith

“Guitars (except when played in "classical"—that is, archaic—style) are low [status] by nature, and that is why they were so often employed as tools of intentional class degradation by young people in the 1960s and '70s. The guitar was the perfect instrument for the purpose of signaling these young people's flight from the upper-middle and middle classes, associated as it is with Gypsies, cowhands, and other personnel without inherited or often even earned money and without fixed residence.”
― Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

“The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority the resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.”
― Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast

“It is impossible to understand Crowley. unless we grasp that, like Madame Blavatsky and Mathers and Yeats and Florence Farr, he took magic as seriously as Lord Rutherford took atomic physics. Literarym commentators often make the same mistake about Yeats: that he regarded magic as a romantic exercise in suspension of disbelief. Yeat's [sic] magical notebooks reveal this to have been untrue; they go into overwhelming detail about magical procedures and symbols and show that he continued to be obsessed by it long after he ceased to be a member of the Golden Dawn.”
― Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast

“to avoid external realities is the way of the Black Brothers and the way of death. The way of the Tao is to accept everything that comes your way, adjust yourself to it without emotion, and forget it.”
― Aleister Crowley