Source: The Secret History
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
“A pretentious, showy life is an empty life; a plain and simple life is a full life.”
Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
"American Literature" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 122.
“and I try
to draw the line
but it ends up running down the middle of me
most of the time.”
Source: Ani DiFranco: Verses
“We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.”
In the Observer, 6 December 1953.
1950s
McKenna interview (1992)
Context: Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. People lived in towns and small farms where they knew everybody and people didn't move around so much so things were a little more peaceful. There were things that they were afraid of for sure, but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety level of the people is in the stratosphere. TV sped things up and caused people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle, and drugs also had a lot to do with it. With drugs people can get so rich and whacked out and they've opened up a whole weird world. These things have created a modern kind of fear in America.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
