“As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.”

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.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.

What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.

All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.