“I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico, or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing".”
― The Dharma Bums
― The Dharma Bums
“I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.”
― The Dharma Bums
― The Dharma Bums
“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”
― The Dharma Bums
― The Dharma Bums
“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”
― The Dharma Bums
― The Dharma Bums
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― The Dharma Bums
― The Dharma Bums
Jonathan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jonathan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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