Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 30
Context: The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.
If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill.
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 68
“If your archenemy tried to kill you, this person would attempt to stop him.”
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006), Recognizing Your Nemesis
April 9, 2008 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=29562_Another_Palestinian_Mass_Murder_Attack&only
That's what's fascinating.
As quoted in "Artur Balder details Hispanic immigration documentary Little Spain" by Annie Martin at UPI (25 November 2014) http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2014/11/25/Artur-Balder-details-Hispanic-immigration-documentary-Little-Spain/3261416930429/
“The Power of the Word,” p. 37.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Variant: In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Context: Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterward we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this love has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind — that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us — Nothingness.
