from The Spirit of Zen, by Alan Watts

"Just as no person can possess life, so no idea which a person may possess can define it; the idea of possession is illusory, for apart from the fact that all things must eventually pass away into some other form, and can never remain in one place for eternity, at the root of possession lies the desire that things shall not alter in any way, and this is a complete impossibility. If, therefore, life can never be grasped, how can it ever be understood? How can truth be known if it can never be defined? Zen would answer: by not trying to grasp or define it, and this is the fundamental Buddhist ideal of non-attachment, or the Taoist ideal of wu-wei.

But Buddhism and Taoism go further than saying that nothing can ever be possessed; they declare that those who try to possess are in fact possessed, they are slaves to their own illusions about life. Spiritual freedom is just that capacity to be as spontaneous and unfettered as life itself . . . But non-attachment does not mean running away from things to some peaceful hermitage, for we can never escape from our own illusions about life; we carry them with us, and if we are afraid of them and wish to escape it means that we are doubly enslaved. For whether we are content with our illusions or frightened of them, we are equally possessed by them, and hence the non-attachment of Buddhism and Taoism means not running away from life but running with it, for freedom comes through complete acceptance of reality."

A little collection

"If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?" Zenrin Kushu, by way of Alan Watts.

"Hamburgers and hot dogs and stock tips." A statement heard in passing, over the din of a restaurant, probably misinterpreted.

Trystal adj. Of or relating to a tryst.

And a contribution from Nabokov . . . "Holey dirt roads and humpy forest trails would take impatient Max to the remote trysting place, which was a hunting lodge-- in the grand tradition of elegant adultery." (from Speak, Memory)

"In Marseilles they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel." -- Mark Twain

"Like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other's bodies." -- Kafka, The Castle

Darkly is an adverb. That you had enough bad taste to lift the word from one of the greatest titles of all time does not in any way salvage your use of the word. Regardless of how stupid you are, it's still an adverb.

Said by a telemarketer, after I told her that she had the wrong number, "I might have the wrong name, but I have the right number." What? Go fuck yourself.

Cleanliness is next to stupidity.

"If people are so dumb, how come more of us smart people don't get rich?" Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods

fetal, vb. -- (to fetal) as in, "fetaling myself on the cold marble floor of the lobby."

"Life is complicated, but not uninteresting." -- Jerzy Neyman.

She has the patience of a whore.

"The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is: What does a woman want?" -- Sigmund Freud

"Market efficiency is a process, not a condition." -- CMN Deming, paraphrasing Ed Easterling.

"Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. This is the first step toward becoming either estimable or agreeable; and until it is taken there is no hope." -- William Lamb, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,1834-1841, and unfortunate but remarkably tolerant husband of Caroline Lamb, who was Lord Byron's first mistress.

"Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -- Shakespeare, Macbeth

The body's normal physiological state is sleep, not wakefulness.

I miss having sex with someone else.

"Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation."

"Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world."

Why did I lie here for an hour, and what if anything did I think about in that time?