They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of Magenta, pink, and...
One day [Kahn] walked into a classroom and began a lecture with the words: Light ... is. There followed a pause that seemed seven days long, just long enough to re-create the world.
Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings.
Beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been set up. Suddenly they found eac...
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a...
Like most men, Sherman was innocent of the routine salutatory techniques of the fashionable hostesses. For at least forty-five seconds every guest was the closest, dearest, jolliest, most wittily cons...
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, Please God, don't let me look poor. In the year 2000, they prayed, Please God, don't let me look old. Sexiness w...
Dear Mother,I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...
[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it c...
The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61
First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class mult...
Don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.
You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
The Yanks always wore neckties that leapt out in front of their shirts, as if to announce the awkwardness to follow.
The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity by name, but they were more and more attuned to the principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in h...
A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of...
A perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the...
None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, k...