Solitaire Quotes

How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.

But books–they’re different. When you watch a film, you’re sort of an outsider looking in. With a book–you’re right there. You are inside. You are the main character.

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.

All I know is that I’m here. And I’m alive. And I’m not alone.

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

As far as I'm concerned, I came out of the womb spouting cynicism and wishing for rain.

You like to act as if you care about nothing and if you carry on like that then you’re going to drown in the abyss you have imagined for yourself.

I think you should know that I make up a lot of stuff up in my head and then get sad about it. I like to sleep and I like to blog. I am going to die someday.

If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT!'? ... I mean, why do that if you really don't want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it's all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you've built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.

I don’t want people to be worried about me. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t want people to try and understand why I’m the way I am, because I should be the first person to understand that. And I don’t understand yet. I don’t want people to interfere. I don’t want people in my head, picking out this and that, permanently picking up the broken pieces of me.

There’s a time and a place for being normal. For most people, normal is their default setting. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner.

Nobody is honest, nobody is real. You can't trust anyone or anything. Emotions are humanity's fatal disease. And we're all dying.

Love those who hurt you the most, because they are probably the ones closest to you. They, too, are on a path, and just like you they are learning to walk before they can fly. Imagine if everybody you hurt in life turned their backs on you? You would be playing a hell of a lot of solitaire. Love them no matter what.

You look like you're having a midlife crisis." "It's not a midlife crisis. It's just a life crisis.

There is always Joker to see through the delusion. Generation succeeds generation, but there is a fool walking the earth who is never ravaged by time.

Do you think that, if we were happy for our entire lives, we would die feeling like we'd missed out on something?

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

There comes a point, though, when you can't keep looking after other people any more. You have to start looking after yourself.

There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won't swap her for any other.

School literally doesn’t care about you unless you’re good at writing stuff down or you’re good at memorising or you can solve bloody maths equations. What about the other important things in life?

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

I actually think that a lot of people are very beautiful, and maybe even more beautiful when they are not aware of it themselves.

The problem is that people don't act. The problem is that I don't act. I just sit here, doing nothing, assuming that someone else is going to make things better.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

We’re so used to disaster that we accept it. We think we deserve it.

Just because something doesn't matter doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

I think it's better to just read and not study books.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

You know, if you want to be happier, you have to try. You have to put in the effort. Your problem is that you don’t try.” I do try. I have tried. I have tried for sixteen years.

Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.

I hadn’t realized I was crying. I don’t really feel sad. I don’t really feel anything.

Hello, I hope somebody is listening...If nobody is listening, am I making any sound at all?

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.

I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted - and then, yes, then we don’t think about it anymore until we are about to leave the world again.

Happiness," he says, "is the price of profound thought." "Who's that quote from?" I ask. He winks. "Me.

If this is the best time of my life, I might as well end it immediately.

Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

I think you should know that I make up a lot of stuff in my head and then get sad about it.

Nothing's going to change until you decide you want it to change.

I hate the phone. It is the worst invention in the history of the world, because if you don’t talk, nothing happens. You can’t get by with simply listening and nodding your head in all the right places. You have to talk. You have no option. It takes away my freedom of nonspeech.

we're all waiting for something to change. Patience can kill you

I really don’t do anything unless I actually want to do it. And most of the time I don’t want to do anything at all.

If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.

Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.

I don't know why I made all that fuss the other day. No that's a lie. I do know why. It's because I'm an idiot.

Nice people are vulnerable because they don’t know how to be mean.

I'm a little bit in love with everyone I meet.

A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.

Basking in the light and glory that comes with not giving a damn.

Just because someone smiles doesn’t mean that they’re happy.

Split between the green and the blue, there is an indefinable beauty that people call humanity.

It's all fake. Everyone is faking. Why does no one care about anything?

I just like individual songs. I find one song that I really love, and then I listen to it about twenty billion times until I hate it and have ruined it for myself.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.

I swear to God I’m a freak. I mean it. One day I’m going to forget how to wake up.

It’s just that it’s not socially acceptable to say depressing stuff out loud in the real world because people think that you’re attention seeking.

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

I don't understand why you can't accept things like this. If you can't accept things you don't understand, then you'll spend your life questioning everything. Then you'll have to live out your life in you own head.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

If our brains were as simple as we could understand them, than we would be so stupid that we couldn't understand them again.

a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.

If you can't accept things you don't understand, then you'll spend your life questioning everything. Then you'll have to live out your life in your own head.

So,” he says, slyly raising his eyebrows with typical Michael suavity. “You hate yourself. I hate myself. Common interests. We should get together.

It's raining." He leans on his hand. "If the sun came back out, there'd be a rainbow. It'd be beautiful." / I look out of the window. The sky is grey. "There doesn't need to be a rainbow for it to be beautiful.

We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.

Are you drunk?” “I’m a poet.

most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.

I always do this thing where I accidentally say self-deprecating stuff that makes other people feel really awkward, especially when it’s true.

Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, "Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?" and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.

I’ve been looking for you,” I say. I cannot feel most of my body. For some reason he puts his hands on either side of my face and leans forward and says: “Tori Spring, I have been looking for you forever.

A Russian cosmonaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing Christianity. The brain surgeon was a Christian, but the cosmonaut wasn’t. ‘I have been in outer space many times,’ bragged the cosmonaut, ‘but I have never seen any angels.’ The brain surgeon stared in amazement, but then he said, ‘And I have operated on many intelligent brains, but I have never seen a single thought.

Sometimes I wish I were a normal human being. But I can't. I'm not. No matter how hard I try.

No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs--anything--but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

What can I say? People aren’t observant. People don’t question stuff like this. They never think twice about déjà vu when there could be a glitch in the Matrix. They walk past tramps in the streets without even glancing at their misfortune. They don’t psychoanalyse the creators of slasher-horrors when they’re probably all psychopaths.

Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

I don't belong anywhere. I am neither a heart, a diamond, a club, nor a spade. I am neither a King, a Jack, an Eight, nor an Ace. As I am here - I am merely the Joker, and who that is I have had to find out for myself. Every time I toss my head, the jingling bells remind me that I have no family. I have no number - and no trade either. I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind. Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: he sees too deeply and too much. Truth is a lonely thing.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

I don't want people to be worried about me. There's nothing to worry about. I don't want people to try and under why I'm the way I am, because I should be the first person to understand that. And I don't understand yet. I don't want people to interfere. I don't want people in my head, picking out this and that, permanently picking up the broken pieces of me.

Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.

Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.

The large majority of teenagers who attend Higgs are soulless, conformist idiots. I have successfully integrated myself into a small group of girls who I consider to be “good people,” but sometimes I still feel that I might be the only person with a consciousness, like a video game protagonist, and everyone else are computer-generated extras who have only a select few actions, such as “initiate meaningless conversation” and “hug.

my god! i'm thinking, what incredible shit we've put up with most of our lives - the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and tv machines and telephones -! ah christ!, i'm thinking, at the same time that i'm waving goodby to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote)

Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.

i was accused of being against civilization, against science, against humanity. naturally, i was flattered and at the same time surprised, hurt, a little shocked. he repeated the charge. but how, i replied, being myself a member of humanity (albeit involuntarily, without prior consultation), could i be against humanity without being against myself, whom i love - though not very much; how can i be against science, when i gratefully admire, as much as i can, thales, democritus, aristarchus, faustus, paracelsus, copernicus, galiley, kepler, newton, darwin and einstien; and finally, how could i be against civilization when all which i most willingly defend and venerate - including the love of wilderness - is comprehended by the term

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.