Another Roadside Attraction Quotes
"Despite the spiraling zeitgeist that underscores its urgency, the writer of this document is no journalist, nor is he a scholar, and while he is quite aware of the potential historical importance of his words, still he is not likely to allow objectivity to nudge him off the pillar of his own perspective."
"The function of the artist is to provide what life does not."
"Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants."
"The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of one's existence—the characteristic mode of one's actions—is basically, ultimately what matters."
"Happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self-generating, it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation."
"There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others."
"I believe in birth, copulation and death. Although copulation embodies the other two, and death is only a form of borning."
"A person's got a right to break his own head if he wants to. It's his head. It's his decision."
"After the doctors and scientific experts testified in Congress that cigarettes cause or compound not only cancer but a number of other diseases and are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually, the senior senator from Kentucky stood up just shaking with anger and moaned, 'You're trying to wreck our economy.'"
"Everything that happens in this society sooner or later boils down to a matter of a buck."
"A school of sodden, contemplative poets emerged here, too."
"They turned inward, evolving religious and mythological patterns that are startling in their complexity and intensity."
"A hushed but heavy force hangs in the Northwest air: it defies flamboyance, deflates extroversion and muffles the most exultant cry."
"There is a colony of expatriated North Carolinians up in the timber country around Darrington."
"Neither had ever tasted the genuine article."
"In those ferny forests, the mushrooms are rising like loaves."
"Some of the words are short and grunty, but others are very stretched-out and angular and sensual—like Modigliani nudes."
"True fungus fanciers look upon those two traitors with withering disdain."
"The peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon."
"They had a baboon, true enough. But under no circumstances would Ziller assign Mon Cul a role in the menagerie."
"Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable."
"Actually, there was little time for fungi those first few days at Mom's Little Dixie."
"The sky was afloat with raw oysters and dead nuns, a grim canopy beneath which flew wild ducks by the dozens."
"In the cage, even in the "environmental parks" which the better zoos are providing for their charges, a creature is out of harmony with the natural rhythms of organ and earth."
"A sausage is an image of rest, peace, and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life."
"The only thing that ever disappears is the shape of energy."
"I'm in residence at a monastery where through the damnedest maddest insanest most kooky quirk of bat-blind events I am believed to be Brother Dallas the Texas Chopper."
"Destiny is moving me—Purcell, fate's plucky pawn."
"The very first grocery run I'm on I sneak an epistle off to the Bavarian Motor Co."
"So the other goodies I have to share with you will have to wait until a later edition."
"Rhythm is everything pertaining to the duration of energy."
"That isn't quite enough juice to light up Broadway, now is it, folks?"
"No wonder God never bills us for electricity."
"A linear wrench will not turn a spiral bolt."
"Sooner or later everything boils down to a matter of a buck."
"The preceding theory of gonorrhea is the work of Duke Elohim Jophaniel Forsteton."
"The cockroach has been around a good deal longer than gonorrhea."
"Certainly we are not about to rid ourselves of cockroaches by any means short of nuclear bombs."
"They might lock in an eternal stalemate, unable to budge one another throughout the whole of time."
"The rain did not last through the night. Winter had made one final lunge and expired."
"I'm concerned that I'm taking up too much of your time."
"The smiling jerk who mixes your chocolate sundae in the Vatican soda shoppe may be a master of poisons."
"Imagine how messy it would look in the press—and in the eyes of pilgrims and tourists—if these favorite picturesque toy soldiers are forced to go hacking and stabbing with their almost comical Renaissance halberds."
"Maintain the old decorum with a minimum of blood and fuss."
"It is toward that end that the Swiss Guard is learning karate."
"There is a magnificent Rembrandt, for example, that portrays a couple balling in a hay field."
"Hidden in the catacombs, along with other old manuscripts and documents that for one reason or another must be too dangerous for inclusion in the 500,000-volume Vatican Library, are Dead Sea fragments whose contents are a mystery to all but a powerful few."
"Who knows what an Easter Island plaque might have revealed about the stone heads, the mysterious people who built them, about the origins of man."
"The burden of defending Vatican City has fallen hard on the fancy shoulders of these overgrown Swiss choirboys."
"He who hesitates will never stop Plucky Purcell."
"The hot dog is the pillar of democracy, the pride of the Yankees, the boneless eagle of free enterprise."
"A woman is not always a woman, but a good cigar is a horse of a different feather."
"When retribution ceases to follow evil, then the fabric of civilization begins to unravel."
"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable."
"Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness."
"The only authority I respect is that one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime."
"Laws symbolize ethical arts, proper behavior toward other human animals. Laws have no moral content, they merely symbolize conduct that does."
"If we respected each other, if we respected animals and if we respected the land, then we could dispense with laws and cut the middleman out of morality."
"The continual roar of blood was a memento mori."
"Every thistle-top having one of the gaily colored creatures squatting on its head, and among the thorny slums of the leaves being found the webs which the caterpillar weaves."
"Jesus was a Jew. Judaism was a father religion. Christianity also grew into a father religion. But the old religion was a mother religion."
"Nature isn't stable. Life isn't stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state."
"Jesus taught by example. He went all the way and there was no compromise and no hypocrisy."
"His strength of character was incomparable, yet he was not the least bit original in his thought."
"Everyone is divine if only he knows he is divine."
"Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo."
"Jesus, it's me, you know, the friendly with-it priest who puts your transcendental rap into the groovy idiom of the cool kids on the corner."
"Jesus, there is practically no historic evidence of your existence."
"When Jesus overturned the bankers' tables and kicked the capitalists out of the temple, he momentarily succumbed to the temptation to indulge in violent revolution in the cause of freedom."
"Jesus, old buddy, I'm not any Jewish intellectual and I can't engage you in no fancy theological arguments such as you're used to in the temples."
"The fear of death is the beginning of slavery."
"Nothing to lose, Marx, and nothing to gain. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain."