“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”

“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix. Or at least we didn’t think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn’t move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.”

“Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”…”There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”…”But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”…”Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.”…”Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”…”Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”…”All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”…”Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”…”Stability was practically assured.”

“God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment.”

“The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”