“The world is now a virus.”

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don’t mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all.

If after having been exposed to someone’s presence you feel as if you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else’s ass.

A consumer society is about simplfying and degrading the consumer as well as the product.

I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

The nonconformist here may be “beat down” by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.

Language is a virus from outer space.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

Hate is a virus.

Getting vaccinated not only protects you, it also reduces the risk that you give the virus to others.

Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.