“I remember when Jack Smith, putting together a story on me, read me a quote from Jack London: ‘I would rather be a meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.’ ‘What does that mean to you?’ Jack Smith asked. I thought for a long moment, and then I said, ‘Throw deep.’”

Kenny Stabler Snake

“What a miserable thing life is: you’re living in clover, only the clover isn’t good enough.”

Bertold Brecht, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

“Liquid sunshine”

What his mother always called pouring rain, according to Bill Clinton while presiding over the dedication of his presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas in a downpour, quoted in Maclean’s November 29, 2004

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.”

Albert Einstein, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

“In this pathetic and simple-minded view, humans are to be but life-support systems for free-wheeling genitalia.”

William Gairdner The Trouble with Democracy

“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”

Elizabeth Bowen, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

“Maybe we’re all just blobs of sentient meat in a senseless existence.”

Tina in the comic strip “Tina’s Groove” in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 15, 2003

“the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby…”

G.K. Chesterton to his fiancée in a letter after her sister Gertrude died, quoted by David Fagerberg in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #6 (April-May 2001)