
“I am the one thing you can never kill. I am Hope.”
Source: The Final Empire
"Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)
Context: I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
“I am the one thing you can never kill. I am Hope.”
Source: The Final Empire
“Never stand when you can sit; never walk when you can ride; never Push when you can Pull.”
Source: The Peter Principle (1969), p. 63
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: All of us collectively are fumbling towards an apprehension of something that feels like a kind of group awareness – we are trying to feel the shape of it, it’s not here yet, and a lot of us are probably saying a lot of silly things. That’s understandable. There is something strange looming on the human horizon. If you draw a graph of all our consciousness, there is a point we seem to be heading towards. Our physics, our philosophy, our art, our literature – there is a kind of coherence there, it may look disorganised at first glance, but there is a fumbling towards a new way of apprehending of certain basic fundamentals.