Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
I was forever Billy Hamill’s son, but I no longer wanted to be the next edition of Billy Hamill. He had his life and I had mine. If there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father’s father, on down through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination. Someone among the males of this family had to break the pattern. It might as well be me. I didn’t have that drink. Twenty years have gone by, and I’ve never had one since.
You know, we come up with all kinds of things, but still the wound does not heal, still the reality is suffering. We come up with all kinds of new drugs, all kinds of new approaches. Yes, there are all kinds of human decencies to embrace, and we should really try to be nice to one another, but nothing dissolves this sense of irritation and unsatisfactoriness that we all feel. Nobody gets over that.
One must have teeth. Then love’s like biting into an orange when the juice squirts in your teeth.
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.
I never practice; I always play.
It may be that true happiness lies in the conviction that one has irremediably lost happiness. Then we can begin to move through life without hope or fear, capable of finally enjoying all the small pleasures, which are the most lasting.
When Christ said, “I was hungry and you fed me,” he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict; it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.
Old habits are strong and jealous.
Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons, and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.
What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?
The formula “two and two make five” is not without its attractions.
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. . . . Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.
All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.
And what if it were true after all? Tell me, and what if it were true?
