"I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong."-John Lennon
"We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets."-Marilyn Monroe
"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"-John Lennon
...
"What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse."-Holden Caulfield
"It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road."-Holden Caulfield
"In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up
does not necessarily come down; a body at rest does not tend to stay at
rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and
opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow
backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is
fluid: tables can be clocks; faces, flowers. Another odd feature of the
parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you
are in it you can easily see the world you came from."-Susanna Kaysen
"God is a perfect musical note."-Captain Beefheart
"“Well, you know, like, I don't really give a fuck what the general public think.”-Sid Vicious
"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."-Mae West
"If you're going through hell, keep going"-Winston Churchill
"I can resist anything except temptation"-Oscar Wilde
"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."-Andy Warhol
""When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them." -Andy Warhol
"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." -Andy Warhol
“I don't care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.”-Che Guevara
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."-Alexander Supertramp
"The real heart and soul of a moving concert is like an organism."-Bebe Buell
"You know what rock and roll means, right? It means rock and roll in the sack. It means sex: the lyrics, the beat of it, the thunderous feeling through your body. "-Pamela Des Barres
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
"because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
Interviewer: You do not accept the existence of a god, a divine prime mover?
Ayn Rand: No.
Interviewer: Now the reason you don't is because you can't prove that such an entity or being or energy exists.
Ayn Rand: I can't nor can anyone else. There is no proof.
Interviewer: There is no proof so therefore you've concluded that there isn't one?
Ayn Rand: That's right.
Interviewer: You can't prove there isn't.
Ayn Rand: You are never called upon to prove a negative. That's a law of logic.
Interviewer: You have to be impressed with the universe. When you see order in the universe, this wasn't an accident, Ms. Rand.
Ayn Rand: Oh now you've got to give me a few minutes. [laughter] What do you think would happen in a disorderly universe? What is the concept of order? What does it have to do with the things which exist? Do they clash with each other? If there were contradictions they wouldn't exist. There is no such thing as a disorderly universe. Our whole concept of order comes from observing reality and reality has to be orderly because it's the standard of what exists.
Interviewer: Right.
Ayn Rand: So contradictions cannot exist.
Interviewer: OK.
Ayn Rand: The real issue as far as man is concerned, is that when you accept such an important issue as the creation of the universe on faith you are destroying your confidence and the validity of your own mind. It has to be either reason or faith. I am against god for the reason that I don't want to destroy reason. I don't...
Interviewer: Give us a chance, alright? We appreciate your zeal but if you continue that it's going to make it difficult for the other people absorb all this, what's going on here, OK?
Ayn Rand: How can I be against god? I'm against those who conceived that idea.
Interviewer: Tell us why. Tell us why.
Ayn Rand: Because then it gives man permission to function irrationally, to accept something above and outside the power of their reason and superior to reason. You said it, I think unintentionally. You said "so I can't wait to die and find out." That, I'm serious, is one of the results of acting on faith. You can't wait to get out of this life.
Interviewer: And what's wrong with that?
Ayn Rand: Because this life is wonderful, as you said. Because if you look at the the universe, it's wonderful and you have to use your life to the best of your understanding. If you go by emotions, not reason, it means you're going against reality. Something exists, something is right and you say no, I don't like it because I want to believe something else.
Interviewer: I see.
Ayn Rand: You, in effect, go by emotions, by your whims, not by reason.
Interviewer: I just want to get this in before the break. You're an atheist?
Ayn Rand: Yes. [noise] [laughter] I could do the same to you, you know. [laughter] [applause] So you're the host I won't say it, but, in other circumstances I would say I don't agree with religion. I approve of your right to it, but...
Interviewer: You don't approve of religion because?
Ayn Rand: Because it's mystical. Because it's based on faith, not on reason and facts.
Interviewer: So? So for you but not for others, OK. What do you care? Somebody wants to worship a Christmas tree or a telephone pole, that's their business.
Ayn Rand: I respect that legally. I said that everyone has the right to believe anything they want but I don't have to approve. If they are serious, I would say... [noise] [laughter] You know? But I would never pass any laws to stop them.
Interviewer: You've got to allow that you're not smart enough to know whether or not there's a god.
Ayn Rand: Yes. I am and everybody here is.
Interviewer: Is what?
Ayn Rand: Smart enough. It doesn't take much intelligence. Do you know why?
Interviewer: Why?
Ayn Rand: Because you are not called upon, I cannot be called upon to know a negative or to prove a negative. If there is a god and you prove it, that's fine. But you don't tell me you can't know that there isn't. I would say yes I know there isn't because I have been given no evidence.
Interviewer: I think atheists are as arrogant as many of the so-called Christians or relgionists that you defy. I'm saying...
Ayn Rand: Arrogant in what way?
Interviewer: In that you are here with your certainty saying there is no god and anybody who believes there is is... It's almost a suggestion that you believe that you are foolish if you believe there is and I think that's a little arrogant and condescending.
Ayn Rand: No. The arrogance and foolishness... I would have to tell the truth. I think it's a bad sign psychologically. It is a sign of a psychological weakness, a man who is afraid to stand on his own mind and has no responsibility. Because it is the absence of proof that brings on false thinkers. Every argument for the existence of god is incomplete, improper and has been refuted and people go on and on because they want to believe. Well, I regard it as evil to place your emotions, your desire above the evidence of what your mind knows.
Interviewer: OK.
Ayn Rand: But that's what you're doing with the idea of god, speaking philosophically.
Interviewer: True.
Ayn Rand: You say you need someone to explain the order but now you have to explain that. You have to take what exists as a fact and start with what exists and see how much you can learn about it.
But it is not right. It is not proper to man to take anything on faith. Religion is a matter of faith. You accept a religion emotionally or because you were born to it. You have not chosen it rationally.
Interviewer: I tend to think of this whole thing as ongoing, that there is an eternity and that we are going to be part of that eternity, that we aren't just corpses in graves when we die.
Ayn Rand: But we aren't corpses in graves, we are not dead. Don't you understand that when this life is finished, you're not there to say oh how terrible that I'm a corpse? No.
Interviewer: Well this is true.
Ayn Rand: It's finished. And what I've always thought was a sentence from some Greek philosopher, I don't unfortunately remember who it was, but I read it at 16 and it has affected me all my life. I will not die. It's the world that will end. [silence] …
One night, at 11:30 p.m., an older African American woman was standing on the side of an Alabama highway trying to endure a lashing rainstorm. Her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride. Soaking wet, she decided to flag down the next car.
A young white man stopped to help her, generally unheard of in those conflict-filled 1960s. The man took her to safety, helped her get assistance and put her into a taxicab.
She seemed to be in a big hurry, but wrote down his address and thanked him. Seven days went by and a knock came on the man's door. To his surprise, a giant console color TV was delivered to his home.
A special note was attached. It read: "Thank you so much for assisting me on the highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes, but also my spirits. Then you came along. Because of you, I was able to make it to my dying husband's bedside just before he passed away. God bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others."
Sincerely, Mrs. Nat King Cole.
Were never going to have it all figured out. I'm content with that.
Sound as ever,
Trevor 4/14/11
