A Couple of Quotes On Which Recently I’ve Leaned

Okay, okay… so four isn’t, strictly speaking, a “couple.” Consider the last two a bonus, or this to be A Couple of A Couple of Quotes…

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“Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibility.” —Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

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“Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.” – Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. pp 192. Picador USA.

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“We feel safe, huddled within institutions–churches, banks, madrigal groups–but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox.” – J. H. Updike, pp. 257; Self Consciousness, A A Knopf, 1989, First Ed.

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“I told her we were in the same open boat. This after all this evolutionary time, we still woke up confused, knowing everything about our presence here except why. I admitted that the world was sick and random. That the evening news was right. That life was trade, addiction, rape, exploitation, racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, land mines, hunger, industrial disaster, denial, disease, indifference. That care had to lie to itself, to carry on as if persistence mattered. It seemed a hollow formula, discredited even by speaking it aloud. A lifeboat ethic that only made sinking worse.” — Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers