“It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.”

You won’t find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

He had that rare weird electricity about him – that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.

If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

I was never trying, necessarily, to be an outlaw. It was just the place in which I found myself.

There is no story unless you’ve written it.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don’t tell them anything.

Writing is the flip side of sex – it’s good only when it’s over.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.

Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do. Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Don’t assume that it’s too late to get involved.

You really have to be satisfied with what you are and accept from life what it still very generously offers you – and notice it, and be glad for it.

A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.

As far as beauty is concerned, in order to be confident we must accept that the way we look and feel is our own responsibility.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop–you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.