Plants

"There was a great abundance and variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence. It was never the season for the dorian. It was always going to arrive from Burma sometime or other, but it never did. By all accounts it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a refreshment. We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture. They said that if you could hold your nose until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the fruit was in your mouth, you would faint. There is a fortune in that rind. Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for cheese."

"One day when I was practicing chanting in my temple in Vietnam, there was a durian on the altar that had been offered to the Buddha. I was trying to recite the Lotus Sutra, using a wooden drum and a large bowl-shaped bell for accompaniment, but I could not concentrate at all. I finally carried the bell to the altar and turned it upside down to imprison the durian, so I could chant the sutra. After I finished, I bowed to the Buddha and liberated the durian. If you were to say to me, "Thây, I love you so much I would like you to eat some of this durian," I would suffer. You love me, you want me to be happy, but you force me to eat durian. That is an example of love without understanding. Your intention is good, but you don't have the correct understanding."

"For example, imagine part of a review of literature on the theological significance (tongue-in-cheek, of course) of the durian, that Asian fruit that has only lovers and haters: "Professor Adriel Sandoval, in agreement with Yeng Ka Seng and Komarno, states that durian will be the fruit of the tree of life. (References tor all three) Sandoval goes so far as to suggest that only the durian could have been tempting enough to Adam and Eve to cause them to disobey God's instructions, (Reference) In clear opposition to his position is that of Vasince Suvonapong, who claims that durian came into being only after the fall, once decay and decomposition had set in. (Reference)""

"I have been spending a small fortune in durians, they are relatively cheap and very good this season in Singapore. Like all the good things in Nature--tempests, breakers, sunsets, &c. durian is indescribable. It is meat and drink and an unrivalled delicacy besides, and you may gorge to repletion and never have cause for penitence. It is the one case where Nature has tried her hand at the culinary art and beaten all the CORDON BLEUE out of heaven and earth. Would to Heaven she had been more lavish of her essays! "Though all durians are, perhaps, much alike and not divided like apples and mangoes into varieties, the flavour varies much according to size and ripeness. In some the taste of the custard surrounding the heart-like seeds rises almost to the height of passion, rapture, or mild delirium. Yesterday (21st June, 1907) about 2 p.m. I devoured the contents of a fruit weighing over 10 lb. At 6 p.m. I was too sleepy to eat anything, and thence had twelve hours of almost unbroken slumber."

"Most disgusting of all was the rush [by starving POWs] for the durian nuts [discarded by the Japanese guards]. Of all the fruits in the world, the durian is surely one of the most delicious. Growing on high trees, about the size of a melon, it contains within its tough prickly exterior, kernels the size of chestnuts, surrounded by a soft, sticky, whitish substance. It is this latter substance that possesses the truly wonderful, but indescribable taste, approaching nearest to a concoction of banana and sweetened condensed milk with a haunting flavour that might be onions but which is not. The drawback of the durian is its smell, not only existing in the fruit but residual - stronger by far than pickled onions - so that Europeans never eat them normally, except when out of contact with their countrymen or at special durian parties. The natives believe them to harbour aphrodisiac properties. Perhaps that is why the Japanese ate them. .... However, they enjoyed the fruit. Having sucked away the sticky flesh, they spat out the nuts. Thereupon a few men, mainly the garbage fiends, [the men who scavenged for food on rubbish heaps] would scramble for them. Sometimes they even transferred the nuts straight to their own mouths .... always the nuts were, for ultimate consumption, later baked over a fire."

"[The] durian, of all tropical fruits the most captivating. The unopened fruit was about the siza and shape of a rugby ball; a ball covered with pyramidal spikes which presented a formidable obstacle to entry. Inspection revealed that the outer casing was segmented, and a parang [a type of long, machete-like knife]] inserted between two segemnts could prise the fruit open to reveal within each segment large seeds, coated thickly with an amber creamy flesh, tasting of almonds, bad drains and methylated spirits. The initial reaction was one of revulsion but those who went on to taste were lost forever, hooked for life. And durian was more than a delicacy: it was a meal in itself, rich in everything the body needed."

"The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena."

"Not only is pot way cooler than alcohol, it’s also non-toxic. Dylan Thomas could not have smoked himself to death."

"It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons."

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

"As a source of illumination, ganga has become an instrument in the war against Babylon and Babylonian consciousness. Its use, therefore, plays a major role in the de-alienation and decolonization of the African mind."

"The Rastas, more than any other group, have elevated ganja to a central place in their religious practice and have developed a well-articulated ideology justifying its use and explaining its significance. ... Rastas regard the proscription of ganja use by Babylon's government as part of its strategy of social control."

"I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted."

"I believe pot should be legalized (and Jack Daniels should always remain legal!)"

"HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold."

"You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses."

"Marijuana can act as the loosening agent, so that whatever has been banned from consciousness may come cascading forth. To uncover our deceptions without our usual rationalizations can be unpleasant, an experience that has turned many psychologically fragile individuals away from marijuana despite its therapeutic catharsis."

"For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it."

"Liar, lawyer, mirror; for you, what's the difference? Kangaroo be stoned; he's guilty as the government"

"Weeping shades of indigo"

"You must have been so high"

"You must have been high"

"I smoke two joints in the morning I smoke two joints at night I smoke two joints in the afternoon It makes me feel alright I smoke two joints in time of peace And two in time of war I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints And then I smoke two more"

"Panama Red, Panama Red He'll steal your woman, then he'll rob your head Panama Red, Panama Red On his white horse, Mescalito He come breezin' through town I'll bet your woman's up in bed with Panama Red"

"Let me get to the point Let's roll another joint Turn the radio loud I'm too alone to be proud."

"When the stress burns my brain just like acid raindrops, Mary Jane is the only thing that makes the pain stop."

"Excuse me while I light my spliff (spliff) Good God, I gotta take a lift (lift) From reality I just can't drift (drift) That's why I am staying with this riff (riff)"

"Let us burn one from end to end And pass it over to me my friend Burn it long, we'll burn it slow To light me up before i go"

"When you get a mouthful, That's Hot Lunch When you smoke a cashed bowl down too much You need to refill that with buds Fat-C, I only smoke fresh nugs."

"Cuz if at first you don't succeed, won't hurt to smoke some weed. Now them words are just a little more personal for me. Seeing as how I blew up off of puffing them trees."

"Smoke weed everyday"

"Straight people don't know, what you're about They put you down and shut you out you gave to me a new belief and soon the world will love you sweet leaf"

"When I die bury me in smoke"

"I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of the parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world."

"My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater. There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there."

"I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say "Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!" I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds."

"Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do. I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for."

"When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights. There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day."

"I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word "crazy" to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: "did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.""

"Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex — on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking."

"The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights — I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate."

"There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to."

"I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened."

"Some people have said that the aggressiveness that alcohol stimulates, and that is certainly the characteristic of alcohol, is consistent with Western values and Western culture, whereas, for example, the more introspective, meditative, reverie kind of state that marijuana produces, or opium produces, seems more consistent with some of the Eastern cultures than with Western cultures, and maybe some of our discomfort with those drugs has to do with that feeling that this is culturally out of sync with us."

"Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!"

"Cannabis, just like morphine, has its usage in medicine. It's unpardonable that authorities forbid sick people access to this medicament and in majesty of law permit to sell cigarettes."

"If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe."

"I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me."

"Dope gets you through times with no money better than money gets you through times with no dope."

"That is not a drug. It's a leaf."