All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.