Acid Trip Quotes

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I've never really thought about it before, but it's a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the hole world's blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone's acid trip.
Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
William untucked the covers and stood, making a mental list of everything he'd need for the coming trip. A few blades, serrated and non serrated. A vial of acid. A bone saw. A spiked paddle. A cat-o'-nine-tails. And a bag of Gummy Bears.
Gena Showalter (The Darkest Secret (Lords of the Underworld, #7))
We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
Flynn threw up his hands. “Am I the only one who feels like they’re on a bad acid trip?” Tharion scrubbed at his face. “I’m still on one, I think.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Can we talk about the miracle that is the Small World ride? It's like an acid trip drag show.
Libba Bray
The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
Hunter S. Thompson
Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, it's contents had survived the transit. "Drink this," he said, unmoved by Cabal's anger. "You need to save your voice for your next session." Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. there was a moments pause, just long enough for Cabal's expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes "Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?" Horst's surprise was replaced with mild amusement. "It's root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?" Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle "People drink this?" "Yes." "For non-medical reasons?" "That's right." Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. "They must be insane.
Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (Johannes Cabal, #1))
The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those-maybe everyone-who trips on acid, never really came back. he recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something-innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed
Craig Ferguson (Between the Bridge and the River)
I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No.
Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)
In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...
Tom Wolfe
Amy Grech has a cinematographer's eye, and a surgeon's hand—at once brutal and tender, unsettling yet humane. These stories linger like traces of an acid trip. Highly recommended!” — Jay Bonansinga, National Best-Selling Author of Twisted, Frozen, and The Sinking of the Eastland
Jay Bonansinga
Maya yearns for that time in her own life, not out of some need to escape reality—reality is fine—but simply because she was born that way. Born to yearn, as some people are, for more magical times. This is her fourth acid trip, so she knows about the sadness of coming down, the sense of God having vacated the garden.
Ana Reyes (The House in the Pines)
Because this is the most fun I’ve had since I dropped acid on our field trip to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum.
Jenni Hendriks (Unpregnant)
How are you feeling, man?" he asks me. "Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder. "Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here." I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive. "I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is.
Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
David Foster Wallace
My own acid-eating experience is limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances ... and if I had a choice of repeating any one of the half dozen bouts I recall, I would choose one of those Hell's Angels parties in La Honda, complete with all the mad lighting, cops on the road, a Ron Boise sculpture looming out of the woods, and all the big speakers vibrating with Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It was a very electric atmosphere. If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting ... and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule. Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on ... which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters.
Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
I’m starved for different light, a different sun, different sky. I’ve never really thought about it before, but it’s a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the whole world is blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone’s acid trip. I
Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
Nothing special about me, we've all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgement, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself. And that's how I became the bass player I'm still trying to be. Just exploring for a sense of purpose.
Flea (Acid for the Children)
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Interstellar travel is like a flight to Australia on acid.
Stewart Stafford
I once met an old hippie backpacker who told me spending long periods of time hiking in nature was the equivalent of “tripping on acid, every single day" because you see things so clearly, so differently.
Erin Miller (Hikertrash: Life on the Pacific Crest Trail)
What do you think he saw?" Damn--I regret the awed way I phrased that and the hushed voice I used. As if I think acid is a "religious" experience, a visionary thing. "Himself," Josh says. "You always see your true self on acid. You just usually see more than you want to see. So it all seems disorted." See what I mean? He's not your normal stoner. The guy should become a poet, a psychologist, a scientist. We pull up near Greg's house and stare at it like it's a damn fortress. "You don't think he needs to go to the hospital?" I ask. "Nope," Josh says. "For a while, I thought maybe, yeah. But he's good now, he's off it, he's not hallucinating anymore." "You're sure?" "Yeah." "'Cuz you can die on LSD-" "That's such anti-drug propaganda bullshit, Dan," Josh interrupts. "Nobody's ever died from an LSD overdose. Ever. As long as you keep people from doing stupid things while they're tripping, it's all good man, man. Why do you think I babysat him?" He reaches into the backseat and punches my shoulder. "LSD isn't your dad's smack. So stop worrying." I scrunch down in the seat. How'd he know about that? "Right. What's the plan?" "I'd ask him if ther was a key hidden under a rock," Josh says, "but he's not gonna be much help. Watch." He pokes Greg in the leg, prods him on the shoulder, grabs his cheeks and smushes them together, the way parents do to a baby, and says, " Ootchi googi Greggy, did ums have a good trippy? Did ums find out itty-bitty singies about oos-self zat oos didn't likeums?" Yup... Greg was in his own little world...
J.L. Powers (The Confessional)
he gets on this ARPAnet trip, and I swear it’s like acid, a whole ’nother strange world—time, space, all that shit.” “So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz?” “What. Why would they do that?” “Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.” Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!” We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
But mostly, it’s hard to enjoy the faux–acid trip because I keep running into the same fears I had when I used to take psychedelics for real, like, What if this feeling never goes away? and What if I’m like this forever? I’m always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.
Melissa Broder (So Sad Today: Personal Essays)
All my life has been a search for my highest self and a journey to the depths of spirit. Too often disproved by the competitive world, and tripping over my own foolish ego feet, but driven by the beauty, I keep trying, and I stay the course, trying to let go and feel the truth of the moment.
Flea (Acid for the Children)
Every little thing now has to be about maximising your potential, and perfecting yourself, and honing yourself, and getting the best deal out of your life, and out of your body, and out of your precious fucking time. Everything’s a corporate retreat now. Everything has utility. You want to get fucked up and just escape your own existence for once, just check out of your life for a while, like every other human being who has ever lived? No. Even a fucking acid trip has to be a means to an end. It has to be about team-building. It has to be about trust and wellness and creativity. It has to be about your authentic journey towards physical and psychological perfection. It has to be about you asserting the integrity of your choice to do it in the first place. It can’t be a lapse of judgment. There are no lapses of judgment. It can’t be wrong. There are no wrongs. There’s just choice, and choice is neutral, and we’re neutral, and everything is neutral, and everything’s a game, and if you want to win the game then you’re going to have to optimise yourself, and actualise yourself, and utilise yourself, and get the edge, and God forbid that you should have an actual human experience of frailty, or mortality, or limitation, or humanity, or of the fucking onward march of time – those are just distractions, those are obstacles, they’re defects, they’re inconveniences in the face of our curated, bespoke, freely fucking chosen authentic existence, and sure, we can never quite decide if we’re the consumers of our lives or the products of them, but there’s one thing we are damn sure of, which is that nobody on earth has any right to pass any judgment on us, either way. Freedom in the marketplace! It’s the only thing that matters! It’s the only thing that exists!
Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood)
The courtside entertainment provided similar commercial thrills. Smaller businesses that couldn't afford their own teams bought the right to have company mascots wander the aisles, where they posed for photographs, danced as much as their cumbersome costumes allowed, and further blurred the line between professional basketball and a Lewis Carroll acid trip.
Rafe Bartholomew (Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball)
Some of them had terrible bummers—bummer was the Angels’ term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world’s term for a bad trip on LSD.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Later, on the way back, someone says: We used to be equals. Now it’s Kesey’s trip. We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
glommed onto his lip and, in fact, gets higher than any man alive, on any and all things one throws his way, and picks up the name Zonker on this trip—
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Change this damn dress to something that doesn't look like Cinderella took acid and met Alice in Wonderland for a trip
Amelia Hutchins (Escaping Destiny (The Fae Chronicles, #3))
Bad trip!” Pancho screams. “What do you mean, bad trip!” and he throws the book to the floor, but Kesey is already off into the back of the house. And Pancho knows his whole thing is, in fact, not sharing beauty rugs at all, but simply his bad trip, and they all know that’s what it’s all about, and he knows they know it, and the whole game is over and so long, Pancho Pillow.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Change this damn dress to something that doesn’t look like Cinderella took acid and met Alice in Wonderland for a trip, and even though I don’t want to be your damn dinner, I will have dinner with you.
Hutchins
None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody’s thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that’s what he’s going to do on this trip, kick asses. He’s going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, ‘I’m sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I’m not sorry I’m an ass-kicker. That’s what I do, I kick people in the ass.’ Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Big Cyndi is six-six and on the planetoid side of three hundred pounds, the former intercontinental tag-team wrestling champion with Esperanza, aka Big Chief Mama to Esperanza's Little Pocahontas. Her head was cube shaped and topped with hair spiked to look like the Statue of Liberty on a bad acid trip. She wore more makeup than the cast of Cats, her clothing form-fitted like sausage casing, her scowl the stuff of sumos.
Harlan Coben (Darkest Fear (Myron Bolitar, #7))
This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "conciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
Hunter S. Thompson
Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!
Don Lattin (The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America)
Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparation, where the trip was presented as a learning experience and a process of self-discovery. They all took place in safe, supportive environments. They generally did not fit the stereotypical model of teenagers dropping acid at a rock concert, looking for awesome visuals and good vibes.
Rick Doblin (Manifesting Minds: A Review of Psychedelics in Science, Medicine, Sex, and Spirituality)
William untucked the covers and stood, making a mental list of everything he’d need for the coming trip. A few blades, serrated and nonserrated. A vial of acid. A bone saw. A spiked paddle. A cat-o’-nine-tails. And a bag of Gummy Bears. Gods, but this was going to be fun.
Gena Showalter (The Darkest Secret (Lords of the Underworld, #7))
Kesey says very softly: “I know how you feel, Sandy. I’ve been there myself. But you just have to stay with it”—which makes Sandy feel good: he’s with me. But then Kesey says, “But if you think I’m going to be your guide for this trip, you’re sadly mistaken.” And he walks off.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before. Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus— casually, almost as an afterthought. “You ever hear anything about Russell?” The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, bout frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary. But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything.
Emma Cline (The Girls)
You hear about the guy who took too much blotter acid and had a lifelong trip?” he asked me once. “The cops were outside his door, coming to bust him, so he ate his whole stash. Now he thinks he’s a glass of orange juice. He’s in the nuthatch, bug-eyed and shivering, terrified someone’s coming to drink him.
Craig Davidson (The Saturday Night Ghost Club)
Which he was. Cassady wanted intellectual communion. But the intellectuals just wanted him to be the holy primitive, the Denver kid, the natural in our midst. Sometimes Cassady would sense they weren’t accepting him intellectually and go off into the corner, still on his manic monologue, muttering, “All right, I’ll take my own trip, I’ll go off on my own trip,
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Within the first twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, the blood pressure starts to increase. Not long afterward, the metabolism levels go haywire, giving a person an uncontrollable craving for carbohydrates. The body temperature drops and the immune system gets weaker. If this goes on for too long, there is a good chance that the mind will turn against itself, making a person experience visions and hear phantom sounds akin to a bad acid trip. At the same time, the ability to make simple decisions or recall obvious facts drops off severely. It is a bizarre downward spiral that is all the more peculiar because it can be stopped completely, and all of its effects will vanish, simply by sleeping for a couple of hours.
David K. Randall (Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep)
Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in ‘our own country’––in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him…but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody––or at least some force––is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic…a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister…all the way up to “God”.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
My mother’s true appeal went beyond the clash of the beautiful trust fund darling as the arm candy of an overweight trailer salesman. Carl grew up in harsh, chaotic poverty. His escape was the alcoholism that was conceived during puberty and flourished throughout adulthood. His initial career was a diesel mechanic wearing faded coveralls with oil up his nails and sweat on his brow. His earliest homes were the dingy trailers he would later profit from. His first marriage was doused with benders, acid trips, and sex crazed parties packed with orgies with a first wife who’d lost track of number of dicks shoved down her throat in the midst of intoxication. I don’t know what sparked his revelation, but at some point, Carl decided to fiercely pursue the world he envied. He wanted a life of starched, white shirts, ties, SUVs, and picket fences. He ached for the scent of steaks grilling on his sunny patio. He dreamed of white-collar southern beauty and my mother, in all her naïve innocence, was the loveliest possession he could ever obtain.
Magda Young
marveling, as he always did in the aftermath of his spells, just how much they resembled tropical storms. As they approached, he often could sense the change in barometric pressure, as he had done on the ferry, even though the storm was still far out at sea, churning away, gathering force, bearing down. When it finally came ashore there wasn’t much to do but ride it out, just let it howl and rage and do its worst. At some point his buffeted, terrified psyche simply gave way to a profound sense of calm, there in the storm’s gentle eye. It wasn’t unlike what people coming down from acid trips often described—the self simply dissipating. To Teddy, a breathtaking moment of splendid, weightless drifting away. In another second or two the world and its cares would cease to matter. In their place, blessed oblivion. But then the winds returned, the shard pierced flesh, and he would know the truth—that escape was yet another false narrative. Later, bloodied and chastened and exhausted, he would do what he always did—claw up into the light, blinking, and survey the damage. Make an inventory of what was irretrievably lost, what was merely damaged and in need of mending, and then, most vitally, somehow locate and reestablish that charmless but necessary even keel that allowed for smooth, if unadventurous, sailing. What he called his life.
Richard Russo (Chances Are . . .)
I realized that music was a force that brought people together and gave them power. People living outside society need a sound to believe in. A sound that cannot be owned or emulated by squares. It inspires the marginalized and the rebels. It gives a soundtrack to their walk that only they understand. It speaks for people who might not otherwise have a voice. It dawned on me that music was not just a fun-to-play-beautiful-thing to trip people out and make ’em happy. I thought of the old jazz guys I knew who couldn’t catch a break, and how the music they played was a personal voice for each of them, one that no rich person could ever silence. I had a deep desire to connect with it, I knew there was no faking it, you had to live the notes.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to Surfer magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from “Surf City.” To me, this was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: “two girls for every boy,” except I sang it as “Two girls for every goy.” Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He’s still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music.
Richard Goldstein (Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s)
What I hope will continue to happen, because it’s already starting to happen. All of us are beginning to do our thing, and we’re going to keep doing it, right out front, and none of us are going to deny what other people are doing.” “Bullshit,” says Jane Burton. This brings Kesey up short for a moment, but he just rolls with it. “That’s Jane,” he says. “And she’s doing her thing. Bullshit. That’s her thing and she’s doing it.” “None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody’s thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that’s what he’s going to do on this trip, kick asses. He’s going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, ‘I’m sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I’m not sorry I’m an ass-kicker. That’s what I do, I kick people in the ass.’ Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Well, now, if we’d known we were going to have such…ah…gra…that is, illustrious company, we’d have-“ “Swept off the chairs?” Lucinda suggested acidly. “Shoveled off the floor?” “Lucinda!” Elizabeth whispered desperately. “They didn’t know we were coming.” “No respectable person would dwell in such a place even for a night,” she snapped, and Elizabeth watched in mingled distress and admiration as the redoubtable woman turned around and directed her attack on their unwilling host. “The responsibility for our being here is yours, whether it was a mistake or not! I shall expect you to rout your servants from their hiding places and have them bring clean linens up to us at once. I shall also expect them to have this squalor remedied by morning! It is obvious from your behavior that you are no gentleman; however, we are ladies, and we shall expect to be treated as such.” From the corner of her eye Elizabeth had been watching Ian Thornton, who was listening to all of this, his jaw rigid, a muscle beginning to twitch dangerously in the side of his neck. Lucinda, however, was either unaware of or unconcerned with his reaction, for, as she picked up her skirts and turned toward the stairs, she turned on Jake. “You may show us to our chambers. We wish to retire.” “Retire!” cried Jake, thunderstruck. “But-but what about supper?” he sputtered. “You may bring it up to us.” Elizabeth saw the blank look on Jake’s face, and she endeavored to translate, politely, what the irate woman was saying to the startled red-haired man. “What Miss Throckmorton-Jones means is that we’re rather exhausted from our trip and not very good company, sir, and so we prefer to dine in our rooms.” “You will dine,” Ian Thornton said in an awful voice that made Elizabeth freeze, “on what you cook for yourself, madam. If you want clean linens, you’ll get them yourself from the cabinet. If you want clean rooms, clean them! Am I making myself clear?” “Perfectly!” Elizabeth began furiously, but Lucinda interrupted in a voice shaking with ire: “Are you suggesting, sirrah, that we are to do the work of servants?” Ian’s experience with the ton and with Elizabeth had given him a lively contempt for ambitious, shallow, self-indulgent young women whose single goal in life was to acquire as many gowns and jewels as possible with the least amount of effort, and he aimed his attack at Elizabeth. “I am suggesting that you look after yourself for the first time in your silly, aimless life. In return for that, I am willing to give you a roof over your head and to share our food with you until I can get you to the village. If that is too overwhelming a task for you, then my original invitation still stands: There’s the door. Use it!” Elizabeth knew the man was irrational, and it wasn’t worth riling herself to reply to him, so she turned instead to Lucinda. “Lucinda,” she said with weary resignation, “do not upset yourself by trying to make Mr. Thornton understand that his mistake has inconvenienced us, not the other way around. You will only waste your time. A gentleman of breeding would be perfectly able to understand that he should be apologizing instead of ranting and raving. However, as I told you before we came here, Mr. Thornton is no gentleman. The simple fact is that he enjoys humiliating people, and he will continue trying to humiliate us for as long as we stand here.” Elizabeth cast a look of well-bred disdain over Ian and said, “Good night, Mr. Thornton.” Turning, she softened her voice a little and said, “Good evening, Mr. Wiley.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
While there was still water in the middle of the pools, animals attempted to reach it through the silt but would get bogged. We spent day after day checking dams, finding about eight to ten animals hopelessly mired in the silt at each and every dam, primarily kangaroos and wallabies. We had to get to the dams early in the morning. Some of the kangaroos had been struggling all night. Steve engineered planks and straps to rescue the animals. The silt would suck us down just as fast, so we had to be careful going out to rescue the roos. Because of the lactic acid buildup in their tissues (a product of their all-night exertions to free themselves), some of the kangaroos were too far gone and couldn’t recover. But we saved quite a few. At one point, Bob came out to lend a hand. I was at the homestead, and the ovulation strip turned bright blue. I hustled over to the creek bed where Steve and his dad were working. I motioned to Steve. “The strip is blue,” I said. He looked around nervously. “I’m out here working with me dad,” he said. “What do you want me to do?” “Just come on,” I whispered impatiently. “But my dad’s right here!” I smiled and took his hand. We headed up the dry creek bed and spent some quality time with the biting ants and the prickles. It was after this trip to our conservation property in the Brigalow Belt that I discovered I was pregnant. I tried to let Steve know by sitting down at the table and tucking into a bowl of ice cream and pickles. “What are you doing?” asked a totally confused Steve. I explained, and we were both totally overjoyed, keeping our fingers crossed for a boy to go along with our darling daughter.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
I don’t mean any disrespect, but if you can question the patriarchy, then I can question you. I think. I don’t really know how this feminism stuff works anyway. I’ve only taken one women’s studies class and that was legit because a cute girl on my floor signed up for it. This girl made me lose my train of thought. I wanted to watch her eat strawberries and make her a mixtape. So I signed up for the class and then she became my girlfriend. But please don’t ask me about anything that happened in that class afterward because love is an acid trip.
Gabby Rivera (Juliet Takes a Breath)
The closest my generation will ever come to the spirit of the original Woodstock was September 12th, 2001. For a few weeks, we believed that we were integral members of the brotherhood of Man. It didn't matter who our neighbors were (aside from a few isolated cases of the paranoia-induced beatings of Sikh children). We wanted to make sure they were holding up so that we could feel that they wanted to know the same about us. We needed a national tragedy beyond our reckoning to shake us loose from the mundane, a trip far more heinous than anything the infamous brown acid would have given us. Woodstock existed for people on the brink of seeing what life meant. September 12th was in acknowledgment for how that life could end, and the almost guilty thrill that we made it through.
Thomm Quackenbush (Holidays with Bigfoot)
my life has been a search for my highest self and a journey to the depths of spirit. Too often distracted by the competitive world, and tripping over my own foolish ego feet, but driven by the beauty, I keep trying, and I stay the course, trying to let go and feel the truth of the moment. This burning thing inside has kept me always curious, always seeking, yearning for something more, always on the endless search to merge with infinite spirit, using whatever tools are available,
Flea (Acid For The Children: A Memoir)
Attempt 1: (Thirty seconds after crossing the bridge.) Adrian: “This place really is kind of beautiful.  Like, look at this flower…” (Flower spits acid into his eyes.) Adrian: “Oh, gawd!  Oh, sweet, merciful gawd!  I think I’m blind!” (He promptly stumbled over a cliff before Dom could put him out of his misery.) (He screamed the entire way down.) Attempt 19: Dom: “You should stay behind me.” Adrian: “Why?  Last time, nothing was on this trail.  And did you see these glowing rocks—" (A panther pounced on him from a low-hanging branch.) Adrian: “Ahh!  Is that my intestine?  How am I even still alive?” (He somehow survived for a full minute.) (A very loud minute.) Attempt 37: (Adrian walked behind Dom, talking to himself) Adrian: “Okay, this time, I’m going to be careful.  I’m going to stay behind Dom.  I’m going to watch my surroundings.  I’m not going to sniff the flowers.  Or actually anything with bright colors.  Hell, if it’s interesting enough to take a picture of it – it can definitely kill you.  Ha!  That’s actually pretty good…  Hey Dom, I think I just invented the Photograph Rule—” (Adrian tripped over a root and bashed his head against a tree trunk.) (He then fell into a small pond where he was promptly drained dry by a swarm of leeches.) (They were bright pink.)
Travis Bagwell (Happy (Awaken Online, #5.5))
don’t mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
We’re not on the Christ Trip. That’s been done, and it doesn’t work. You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip goes.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
Richard began to experiment with hallucinogens. LSD was still popular with America’s youth, and he tripped many times on acid. He also took magic mushrooms and peyote, which were both plentiful and readily accessible in El Paso. High, he’d go out to the desert at night and hunt by the light of the moon, imagining he was in touch with Satan, that Satan was communicating with him.
Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
These men developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, or “Freudo-Marxism,” integrating the extraordinarily bad but influential twentieth-century ideas of Sigmund Freud with the extraordinarily bad but influential nineteenth-century teachings of Karl Marx. This was no match made in heaven. The noxious Marx had conjured up the most toxic ideas of the nineteenth century, whereas the neurotic Freud had cooked up the most infantile ideas of the twentieth century. Swirling the insipid ideas of those two ideological-psychological basket cases into a single malevolent witch’s brew was bound to uncork a barrel of mischief. The Frankfurt School was the laboratory and the distillery for their concoction, and the children of the 1960s would be their twitching guinea pigs and guzzling alcoholics. The flower-children, the hippies, the Yippies, the Woodstock generation, the Haight-Asbury LSD dancers, the sex-lib kids would all drink deep from the magic chalice, intoxicated by lofty dreams (more like hallucinations and bad acid-trips) of fundamental transformation of the culture, country, and world. And a generation or two still later, they would become the nutty professors who mixed the Kool-Aid for the millennials who would merrily redefine everything from marriage to sexuality to gender, wittingly or not serving the Frankenstein monster of cultural Marxism by doing so.
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
Bury them in slime! She cried, flailing about the garden— With a sprig of parsley clutched in her hands—which had always been clamped in her hands. This is strange business, Gets weirder all the time, She said, wrapping some around her finger, for we are always moist in her hand ... "Naturally," she said, "The roots are deep." That was no surprise, but she was mildly curious to know what the hell is THAT Whereupon he got very clumsy, giggled confidentially, and tripped over her shadow, carrying them both into an unaccountable adventure.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
There was no proper comparison for what it felt like being around him. Being manipulated by him. Verbally, emotionally, and physically overtaxed by him. West kept searching for something that came close, and thought maybe an acid trip. Some type of drug. Something you got excited to take, then swallowed, and realized too late that you were going to be trapped on that roller coaster for as long as it wanted to carry you. No way off.
Daniel May (Princess)
The share-and-share-alike anti-establishment ethos of the Topanga Canyon Hollywood hippie entertainment class of the late sixties was what Dennis Wilson offered these ragmuffins. However, pretty quickly, these garbage-eating, acid-tripping, clap-ridden, singsong-sounding runaways proved themselves to be a bunch of freeloading ingrates. They wrecked Wilson's pad and cost him thousands of dollars in venereal-disease medicine and lost, stolen, and damaged property. Until, finally, Wilson just moved out of the house and left it to his business manager to evict the squalid squatters.
Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
The big black void in my head was a well-worn path built into my programming. I realized that no number of singular trippy experiences—whether they came from shrooms, acid, ketamine, hyperventilation, or ayahuasca—would ever completely overwrite this programming, no matter how transcendental. But my trip had also shown me that there was one thing that could combat the void for a little while: gratitude. It was the flame that penetrated the darkness, that filled me all the way up. And the only way to keep the flame going was to keep feeding it. I had to force gratitude into my routines in ways I could not ignore or forget. I had to systematize the light.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
Flynn threw up his hands. “Am I the only one who feels like they’re on a bad acid trip?” Tharion scrubbed at his face. “I’m still on one, I think.” Flynn snorted, but Tharion mastered himself, clearing his throat before saying to the Hind, “Allow me to clarify a few things: You are the Asteri’s most skilled interrogator and spy-breaker. You and your dreadwolves tormented us nonstop not so long ago, in this very city. You are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty much the soul of evil. Yet you’re asking us to help you free our friends. And you expect us not to be suspicious?” She surveyed them all for a long moment, and Tharion had the good sense to sit down before she said evenly, “I’m Agent Daybright.” “Bullshit,” Flynn spat, angling his gun at her again.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
When Nick started the label, he put us in Pink Floyd’s studio in Britannia Row,” says Del incredulously. “It was massive, and when you went upstairs, they still had that big pink pig up there. It was phenomenally expensive, about £500 a day, maybe more, which was a lot of money in 1983. We had the studio block-booked for a month, and we never used to go. It was always empty; we’d be back in Brighton doing loads of mushrooms and acid! I’d be tripping all night, get up about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, go to the pub, and suddenly remember I should be in the studio doing guitars, and I’d just blow it out and go back to bed.
Ian Glasper (Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984)
The stories about Brock running from police with a backpack full of Coors, rubbing up on girls, smoking weed, tripping on acid, photographing tits, were all absent from the image his loved ones and the media projected.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
LSD profoundly alters cognitive unity. Many people feel that the separation between the self and world dissolves when on LSD, and they begin to feel at one with everything. Conscious experience as a unified whole also breaks down on LSD, especially during the acute phase at high doses, so that perceptions that originate from inside are difficult to disentangle from those originating from outside. Experience itself becomes like movie frames slowed down so that each frame is perceivable. We know now that there are neurobiological reasons for this; hallucinogens have profound effects on global brain activity. Psilocybin, for example, decreases the connections between visual and sensorimotor networks, while it seems to increase the connectivity between the resting-state networks. Temporal integration is related to one’s sense of the current moment. Conscious experience is somehow located in time. We feel like we occupy an omnipresent widthless temporal point—the now. As Riccardo Manzotti says: Every conscious process is instantiated by patterns of neural activity extended in time. This apparently innocuous hypothesis hides a possible problem. If neural activity spans in time (as it has to do since neural activity consists in trains of temporally distributed spikes), something that takes place in different instants of time has to belong to the same cognitive or conscious process. For instance, what glues together the first and the last spike of neural activity underpinning the perception of a face? We know that neuronal oscillations at different frequencies act as this temporal glue. However, when you’re on LSD, this glue seems to dissolve. As Albert Hofmann and many others report, your normal sense of time vanishes on psychedelics. The famous bicycle trip on acid during which Hofmann reported that he felt he was not moving, and yet he arrived at home somehow, illustrates this distortion of the brain mechanisms that support our normal perception of the flow of time.
Andrew Smart (Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness)
Soon we began to collect a little group of odd people who would drink with us every cocktail hour. Brigitte, who was a 22-year-old German, very beautiful, could have been on the cover of Stern magazine. Her boyfriend Volker was one of the most beautiful men I'd ever met - people said he looked like James Hunt, the English racecar driver. He was like Billy Budd. He was from Germany and had been a cowboy in Wyoming. Then there was Elford Elliot from England, who had something to do with producing garden gnomes. He was tripping on acid all the time and going out to Delos, this little island off Mykonos, chipping little pieces off the ancient ruins, which he then brought back in the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then there was Bryan, an IBM operator from Australia, who fancied himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde figure. I don't know why. The only story of his I remember was about some Australians who stole a garden gnome from the front lawn of a very elegant mansion and took it for a trip around the world. They would send postcards back to the owner saying things like, 'Having a lovely time in the Fiji Islands' and sign it, 'The Garden Gnome.' After six weeks, they brought the garden gnome back and left it on the lawn with little suitcases full of tiny clothing they'd knitted for it.
Spalding Gray (Sex and Death to the Age 14)
my favorite was when the schoolgirl didn’t complete her homework on time!” Owen was saying enthusiastically. “It was a great piece of filmmaking, because the professor had this dungeon...” “Hey, buddy,” Liam said, leaning forward. “Looks like there’s a gas station at that exit up ahead. Didn’t you say you were running low? How about we stop and fill up, and maybe grab a bite to eat?” “But I’m in the middle of my story!” Owen protested. “Don’t you want to hear what happens to the schoolgirl? Helen does! Don’t you, Helen?” “Get. Gas. Now.” My voice has never been more deadly serious. “Sheesh,” Owen says sadly, signaling and pulling over to exit. “Fine, Helen; if you insist. I’m disappointed in you. Liam is a spoilsport, but I would have thought that since you’re a writer, you would appreciate a good story.” “A good story?” I repeat incredulously. “Owen, nothing you’ve said in the past three hours has been anywhere close to a good story. Listening to you is making my ears hurt. I think they’re melting—your words are like acid being poured into my ear canals.” “Hey! That’s not nice,” Owen says in a grumpy tone. It sounds like he might be pouting. “It’s medically impossible to lose your hearing from listening to someone talk about the glorious art of pornography.” I grumble to myself unhappily. “It’s possible if I buy a popsicle at the gas station, eat the popsicle, and then use the popsicle stick to gouge my own ears out so that I can tolerate the rest of this trip!” Sighing, I lean to press my head against the glass of the car window. It is cold, and I use it like an ice pack to soothe my aching ear and temple. I really do feel like if I need to listen to one more ridiculous tale of sexual depravity for no particular reason, I’m going to lose my mind. I really wouldn’t care if they were good stories. “Seriously. I think I’m going deaf. It hurts.” “Well, that’s a bad problem to have when you’re in the car with two eye doctors!” Owen says cheerfully. “Jesus, man,” Liam says to his friend in dismay. “It’s been hours. You need to stop talking.
Loretta Lost (Clarity (Clarity, #1))
What about her?” she asked with a curious tone. “My memory came back of the night I was attacked. She was being dragged into the forest toward the river. And I ran after them.” She gasped. “Oh, Knox. Do we know if she’s okay?” “I tried contacting her and her father, but nobody picked up.” He gulped back the acid in his throat. “I hope she somehow got away.” “Didn’t Nick mention the river once? Maybe we should check it out.” They hurried to the farthest side of the house, down the same pathway Lisa had been dragged, until they reached the raging river. He doubted someone could cross that. The only other option was a guest had brought those people with them. Back at the house, he continued trying to contact Lisa and her father. A call to her father’s office told him that Lisa’s dad was at his vacation home in the mountains. There was no way to reach him and no other information they could share. “Uh-oh,” Scarlett crossed her arms over her chest. “I know that face. Someone’s going to hack something.” He grinned at the way she whispered it. “Babe, we’re home. There’s no one else here but us. You don’t have to whisper.” “So what are you looking for?” “Just John’s mountain home address. I want to go up there and see him. Find out if she’s okay.” “Did you call their house?” He nodded, emailed himself the address, and grabbed her hand. “Yes. Nobody would give me any information other than John was gone. They knew nothing of Lisa.” “Damn.” “Ready for a quick trip?” he asked as they walked outside again. The sound of helicopter blades reached them. “Thank goodness. I really didn’t want to fly on your back again.” He chuckled at her teasing and helped her into the chopper. An hour later, they touched down in the area near the cabin. He gave the chopper instructions to land at the nearest helipad with availability and he’d give them a call when ready to go. They ran to the front door and knocked repeatedly. Nobody answered. “Maybe they’re out back,” Scarlett said and they went around the house. They walked down a trail. He sniffed but got nothing. His senses told him something was wrong. And a new animal decided
Milly Taiden (Alpha Geek (Alpha Geek, #1))
Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che
Harlan Coben (One False Move (Myron Bolitar, #5))
And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—which one of us even knows her?—had completed her trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
In 1964, just as the Beatles were launching their invasion of America’s airwaves, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and transformed himself from an obscure academic into a star. Oracular, gnomic, and mind-bending, the book was a perfect product of the sixties, that now-distant decade of acid trips and moon shots, inner and outer voyaging. Understanding Media was at heart a prophecy, and what it prophesied was the dissolution of the linear mind. McLuhan declared that the “electric media” of the twentieth century—telephone, radio, movies, television—were breaking the tyranny of text over our thoughts and senses.
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains)
The 20th Century has added little to the tradition. Charlie Manson, called the “LSD madman” by the press, was able to convert his followers to believe that he was both Jesus and Satan only after he had supplemented that acid diet with heavy doses of these deliriant drugs, especially belladonna and jimson weed (the American botanical cousin of mandrake). According to Ed Sanders’ account of the Manson cult, The Family, one of the disciples suffered a 40-point IQ drop after a few belladonna trips with Charlie, and is now in a California mental hospital.
Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
In the absence of Kerista, more sinister alternatives appeared such as the Manson family, in which each new female member was initiated by an LSD trip (or any other drug, including some weird ones, if acid wasn’t available) during which Charlie cunnilinged her to orgasm several times. After that experience, these girls – like Hasan i Sabbah’s followers before them – were ready to follow any orders, including murder.
Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
While on the staff of a large magazine a few years ago, I wanted to print the fact that four grams of niacinamide (Vitamin B-3) will abort most bad LSD trips. The editors rejected this because “it might encourage kids to think they can take acid without risks.” Now, that argument may be valid, but it reminds me of the old assertion that automobiles should not have safety belts because such protection would just encourage drivers to be more careless. People who are going to be damn fools probably can’t be stopped no matter what restrictions are placed on them, but those who want to minimize risks should have safety information available to them.
Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
Nobody can take an acid trip more than about once a week, whatever you may have read in the tabloids. This is becausd LSD has an unusual “tolerance” effect, which comes on quickly and goes away just as quickly. In general, anyone who takes a dose of acid within three of four days of their last trip will get no effect at all. A waiting period is, therefore, built into the drug.
Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
With battle-weary arms, Sheridan slugged his way across the luminous waves sending light-filled droplets splashing into the air like Fourth of July sparklers. Stumbling onto the lake’s rocky banks, he clawed desperately at the animal skin suit, yanking at the fastenings and peeling back the suffocating shroud in a fitful temper tantrum. He collapsed onto the glitter washed shore, his chest heaving, his forehead pulsing with pumped up veins. “That was a nightmare!” Sheridan rasped between gulps of air. “Like some sort of freaked-out acid trip!” “All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it may lead.” Kunchen said calmly.
Phillip White
When we wonder why the language of tradition Christianity has lost its liberation power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man's historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to a boy on an acid trip.
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Wounded Healer : Ministry in Contemporary Society)
Grains also contain significant amounts of phytic acid, or phytate, which is the form in which the mineral phosphorous is stored inside of plants. Humans lack the necessary enzyme to break down phytate, so it passes through our guts undigested. Furthermore, along its trip down our gastrointestinal tracts, it also binds to other essential minerals, including calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc. Once bound, these minerals can’t be absorbed into the body. Worse yet, the highest concentration of phytates are found in the whole grains we’ve been led to believe are so good for us.
Josh Turknett (The Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free, Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good)
Nothing special about me, we’ve all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgment, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
It’s like this one time I tripped on acid and it felt like the more I walked toward a house, the farther away the house got from me. And yes, I just used my LSD hallucinations to make a philosophical point about happiness. No fucks given.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
To see where the psychedelic revolution really started, we have to go back to April 16, 1943, when LSD's creator, Albert Hofmann, mixed a batch of the stuff that he had synthesized from rye fungus five years earlier. He was hoping to find a cure for the common migraine and decided to do more research with a substance he called ¨LSD-25.¨ While mixing it up, a small amount was absorbed through his fingertips. Notes in his diary record history's first acid trip: [What overcame me was] a remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication . . . characterized by an intense stimulation of the imagination, an altered state of awareness of the world. As I lay in a dazed condition with eyes closed there surged up from me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about three hours.
Paul Perry