Miriah Sarai Harvey

Quotes I love

(for Cheryl; Zuna Entrepreneur)

1. A Road Side Attraction; Tom Robbins
   “And what do you believe in?” the parish priest asked Amanda sternly.
   “I believe in birth, copulation and death,” she answered. “Although copulation embodies the other two, and death is only a form of borning. At any rate, I was born nineteen years ago. Someday I shall die. Today, I think I’ll copulate.” And indeed she did.
   Birth, copulation and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom.
   
   
2. A Road Side Attraction; Tom Robbins
   “I thought you might be interested in buying this here dog.”
   “What dog?” asked Amanda fairly, for there was truly no canine in evidence.
   “That’s the novelty of him, mam. He’s invisible.”
   Amanda looked about for some sign of doggy activity.
   “You see,” explained the semifamiliar cowboy, “my nephew came back from San Francisco last week a-fixing to go in business for himself. He buried two thousand capsules of that LSD out by the corral. Well, our ol’ dog he dug up that acid and ate it all, two thousand doses. Six hundred thousand micrograms. We figgered for sure he was gonna die. But that ol’ hound commenced to glow and get ghostly foggy-looking and get harder and harder to see and pretty soon he just disappeared altogether. Entered another dimension, my nephew tells it. Here Cheny, here boy.” The vaguely familiar cowboy stooped down and began to pet the air.
   Amanda wouldn’t give any money for the invisible dog, but she did offer to trade for him four of her wishes and three of her dreams.”
   
   
3. Kandinsky
   “On my palette sit high, round rain-drops, puckishly flirting with each other, swaying and trembling. Unexpectedly they unite and suddenly become thin, sly threads which disappear in amongst the colors, and roguishly slip about and creep up the sleeves of my coat… It is not only the stars which show me faces. The stub of a cigarette lying in an ash-tray, a patient, staring white button lying amidst the litter of the street, a willing, pliable bit of bark—all these have physiognomies for me.”
   
   
4. Sundiata, An Epic of Old Mali
   “To the king’s question he replied, ‘When the seed germinates growth is not always easy; great trees grow slowly but they plunge roots deep into the ground.’
   ‘But has the seed really germinated?’ said the king.
   ‘Of course,’ replied the blind seer. ‘Only the growth is not as quick as you would like it; how impatient man is.’
   
   
5. Dante Alighieri; The Inferno
   “He turned then, and he seemed, across the plain, like one of those who run for the green cloth at Verona; and of those, more like the one who wins, than those who lose.”
   
   
6. A Road Side Attraction; Tom Robbins
   “I’m not going to choose between astrology and genetics because I fail to see any contradiction. The influences on the human animal are too complex and too paradoxical to be explained in terms of any one particular branch of knowledge. When I was twelve years old I watched a spider drink water. You think that didn’t change my life?”
   
   
7. Buddha
   “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”