Quotes about Perception

For when you realized that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what we made to appear.

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

I see as much as doors'll allow, open or shut.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.

Maybe that's a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated, said Japhy. A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles. (The Dharma Bums, Chap. 8)

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty.

To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.

Dean pointed out with a grimace of pain. "It's not the kind of sweat we have, it's oily and it's always there because it's always hot the year round and she knows nothing of non-sweat, she was born with sweat and dies with sweat." The sweat on her little brow was heavy, sluggish; it didn't run; it just stood there and gleamed like a fine olive oil. "What that must do to their souls! How different they must be

Billie offers to dig the garbage pit but does so by digging a neat tiny coffinshaped grave instead of just a garbage hole—Even Dave Wain blinks to see it—It's exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliott in it, Dave is thinking the same thing I am I can tell by a glance he gives me—We've all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there