Monists

"A synthesis of science and spirituality seemed like a dream destined to remain unfulfilled. Until I came upon a little book called Quantum Questions. Alone in a small cabin that sits in an enchanted forest on the slopes of the world’s largest active volcano, I encountered something extraordinary. It was a collection of what can only be called mystical writings — and yet these sagacious musings came not from Buddhist monks or Christian saints, but from the founders of quantum physics."

"He says, "There’s nothing left of me. I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight." This is how Hallaj said, I am God, and told the truth! The ruby and the sunrise are one. Be courageous and discipline yourself. Completely become hearing and ear, and wear this sun-ruby as an earring."

"From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion."

"In the Name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, Who manifests Himself through everything, the revelation of a clear knowing to whomsoever He wishes, peace be upon you, my son. This praise belongs to Allah Who manifests Himself on the head of a pin to whom He wishes, so that one testifies that He is not, and another testifies that there is none other than He. But the witnessing in the denying of Him is not rejected, and the witnessing in the affirming of Him is not praised."

"Love is in the pleasure of possession, but in the Love of Allah there is no pleasure of possession, because the stations of the Reality are wonderment, the cancelling of the debt which is owed, and the blinding of vision. The Love of the human being for God is a reverence which penetrates the very depths of his being, and which is not permitted to be given except to Allah alone. The Love of Allah for the human being is that He Himself gives proof of Himself, not revealing Himself to anything that is not He."

"God, Most High, is the very one who Himself affirms His unity by the tongue of whatever of His creatures He wishes. If He Himself affirms His unity by my tongue, it is He and His affair. Otherwise, brother, I have nothing to do with affirming God's Unity."

"The beloved does not drink a single drop of water without seeing His Face in the cup. Allah is He Who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the tears flow from the eyelids."

"He acts without contact, instructs without meeting, guides without pointing. Desires do not conflict with Him, thoughts do not mingle with Him: His essence is without qualification (takyeef), His action without effort (takleef)."

"Other than He cannot be qualified by two (opposite) qualities at one time; yet With Him they do not create opposition. He is hidden in His manifestation, manifest in His concealing."

"Concealment does not veil Him His pre-existence preceded time, His being preceded not-being, His eternity preceded limit."

"I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart. He said, "Who are you?" I said, "I am You." You are He Who fills all place But place does not know where You are. In my subsistence is my annihilation; In my annihilation, I remain You."

"Ana al-Haqq"

"This is what is signified by the words Anā l-Ḥaqq, "I am God." People imagine that it is a presumptuous claim, whereas it is really a presumptuous claim to say Ana 'l-'abd, "I am the slave of God"; and Anā l-Ḥaqq, "I am God" is an expression of great humility. The man who says Ana 'l-'abd, "I am the servant of God" affirms two existences, his own and God's, but he that says Anā l-Ḥaqq, "I am God" has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says "I am God", that is, "I am naught, He is all; there is no being but God's." This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement."

"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."

"I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing — perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist."

"He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor."

"Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store and wrote a thank-you note to the fire department after it extinguished a blaze and helped save his papers and writings. Despite his reputation, Mr. Salinger “was not a recluse,” said Nancy Norwalk, a librarian at the Philip Read Memorial Library in Plainfield, which Mr. Salinger would frequent. “He was a towns-person.” And last week, after his death, his neighbors would not talk about him, reflecting what one called “the code of the hills.” “Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,” said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. “This community saw him as a person, not just the author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.” The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, interlopers would end up on a wild goose chase. How far afield the directions went “depended on how arrogant they were,” said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store. Mr. Salinger, he said, “was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.”"

"Mr. Salinger is a very serious artist, and it is likely that what he has to say will find many forms as time goes by-interesting forms, too. His novel, The Catcher in the Rye, 87 was good and extremely moving, although-for this reader-all its virtues can be had in a short story by the same author where they are somehow more at home. What this reader loves about Mr. Salinger's stories is that they honor what is unique and precious in each person on earth. Their author has the courage-it is more like the earned right and privilege-to experiment at the risk of not being understood. Best of all, he has a loving heart."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"In the 60s I was a teenager. I liked Franny & Zooey, really everything by J.D. Salinger. I realized it was important who was talking. If you could tap into that you could get a flow going."

"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it."

"Nine Stories blew me away‚ I can still remember reading “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” for the first time, and just weeping with the poignancy...it changed me both spiritually and as a very young writer, because both the insight and the simplicity of the story were within my reach."

"Jesus, he has a helluva talent."

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next."

"I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it."

"If sentiment doesn't ultimately make fibbers of some people, their natural abominable memories almost certainly will."

"I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library."

"What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can't believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It's a prissy word invented by the clergy."

"He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father's Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes—fools, no."

"For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world — not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things — work out rather beautifully."

"The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it."

"Extremes, though, are always risky and ordinarily downright baneful, and the dangers of prolonged contact with any poetry that seems to exceed what we most familiarly know of the first-class are formidable."

"It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person — the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist — who can write a poem that is a poem."

"The hallmark, then, of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananda's terms; i.e, "See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk") — the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile."

"But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist."

"I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."

"I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one."

"Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))."

"Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."

"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."

"I have scars on my hands from touching certain people."

"Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected — never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life."

"The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth."

"I'm a kind of a paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

"How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back "What?""

"I was not only twenty-three, but a conspicuously retarded twenty-three."

"Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her."

"Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant — if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs."

"If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children."