Ug Quotes

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

I love you all. But it's time to say good-bye, for now. be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly. -Tally Youngblood

What happens when perfection isn't good enough?

You're insane!" she shouted. "Pretty cool, huh?" "No!"Tally yelled. "Why didn't you tell me it was broken?" Shay shrugged. "More fun that way?" "More fun?" Her heart beating fast,her vision strangely clear. She was full of anger and relief and...joy. "Well, kind of. But you suck!

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.

When she awoke, the world was on fire.

Shay sometimes talked in a mysterious way, like she was quoting the lyrics of some band no one else listened to.

We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.

I don't want to hurt you but I will if I have too - Tally Youngblood

Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "make me pretty.

Having a brain hurt so much sometimes.

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.

That Shay was in possesion of hand grenades was a comforting thought showed what kind of night this had become.

Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.

Her only way home was to betray her friend.

Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.

And over all those sleepy weeks, the dream always ended the same way, with the dragon coming for the princess saying the same words every time.... "Face it, Tally-wa, you're Special.

I spilled more times than a glass of milk on a roller coaster.

Be careful with the world , or the next time we meet, it might get ugly.

Their reasons don't mean anything unless I have a choice.

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future... all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

Why are you still wearing...?" Aya began. "Oh, that's not smart plastic? You're really an ugly?" David rolled his eyes and Shay said quietly, "David's never had any surge at all. But I wouldn't use the word ugly...Tally might eat you.

Now,young lady,I suppose you're here for a work assignment." Work?" Tally said. They both looked down at her puzzled expression, and Shay burst into laughter.

Your father always suspected that being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain—Maddy glanced at Tally—and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities. He always thought that some people could think their way out of it.

Who can tell me which president had a cross-eyed wife with a bad case of the uglies?" Chaney asked. "Make sure you get that down," Travis whispered. "I'm gonna need to know that for job interviews.

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.

It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.

Sometimes, the hardest thing was doing nothing.

Yeah, but damn!" Kate said, fanning herself with her hand. "When I was your age all of the guys were trying to prove how anti-establishment they were by out-uglying each other. I so got robbed!

It's not the traveling that takes courage Tally. I've done much longer trips on my own. It's leaving home.

Let me get this stright, Aya-Chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie?" -Frizz mizuno

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.

your not alone, Tally. Don't pretend you are

Tally, do you ever suffer from sudden flashes of anger or euphoria, countersocial impulses, or feelings of superiority?

But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.

My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very ugly

Listen, you bubblehead-up-until-five-minutes-ago...

That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.

Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.

Yes. What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

The very idea of making shoes by hand boggled her mind.

It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.

Frighteningly Beautiful, Dangerously Strong, Breathtakingly Fast. Face it Tally-wa you're special...

Didn't this beat everything? A pretty and an ugly taking a stroll together. The warden came closer, confusion all over his middle-pretty face. Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "Make me pretty.

She carried a knife inside of herself now, one that was always cutting her. She could feel it every time she swallowed, every time her thoughts strayed from the splendor of the wild.

Don't follow me, I'm lost.

Being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain . . . and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities.

Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.

The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.

Come on, it's almost midnight. Let's go watch them cut the cake.

And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful... or if the fall had changed the story completely.

...humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.

Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or shay, or peris-unlike people in general-it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally.

Mr. Awkward rolls up between us, lights a cigarette, makes himself comfortable. It’s the same bastard who shows up after you’ve bumped uglies with a stranger.

The world needed more fireworks- especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.

you just took on five million years of evolution again

Even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil.

Sure am glad I'm not royalty," I muttered. "I wouldn't want to have to bump uglies with someone I can't stand. On a regular basis. And no one else." "Ow!" I exclaimed, trying to yank my fingers from Trent but finding them caught. Then I colored, realizing what I'd said. "Oh… sorry," I stammered, meaning it. "That was insensitive." Trent's frown turned into a sly smirk. "Bump uglies?" he said, eyes on the table behind me. "You are a font of gutter slang, Rachel. We must do this again.

The lie took form as she spoke, pulling on as many strands of truth as it could reach.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn't even a pretty one.

UG staff is patching up wargs, and all surviving Guardians are tied up," Wraith said, "But they could probably use some medical attention. Especially the one dipshit with the idiotic Mohawk. He lost a lot of blood." "Because you ate him," Sin said wryly. Wraith blinked with exaggerated innocence. "Fighting makes me hungry.

We communicated with pithy, rather monosyllabic thoughts: viz. Run, Jump, Where? Left, Up, Duck, ect. (This latter was an observation I made on the edge of a lake. Nathaniel unfortunately took it as a command, which resulted in our temporary immersion.) We didn't ever quite say Ug, but it was a close-run thing.

Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring. I can't imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.

I know what it’s like to be manipulated, Aya-la. And I know what it’s like to be in danger. While your city was building you mansions to live in, my friends and I have been protecting this planet. We’ve spilled more blood than you have flowing in your veins. So don’t try to make me feel guilty! -Tally Youngblood, Extras

...I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think Who's that? and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say." "I'd rather have something to say.

Tally sighed, tipping her feet again to follow. "Maybe that's because they have better stuff to do than kid tricks. Maybe partying in town is better than hanging out in a bunch of old ruins." Shay's eyes flashed. "Or maybe when they do the operation-when they grind and stretch your bones to the right shape, peel off your face and rub all your skin away, and stick in plastic cheekbones so you look like everyone else-maybe after going through all that you just aren't very interesting anymore.

Dying is one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.

If you see everything through hovercams and feed stories, you wind up blind to what's right in front of you.

The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.

History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.

The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (part 3, Pretties)

She wasn't here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.

It's not the way Zane looks, David," she said, her voice trembling with anger. "It's because he makes me bubbly, and because we took a lot of risks together. It could just as easily be me lying there, and he would stay with me if it was." "It's just programming!" "No. It's because I love him.

I can pick up the city feeds on my antenna. It said they were going to change you all. Turn you into something less dangerous. Are you still...?" She gazed at him. "What do you think, David?" He peered into her eyes for a long moment, then sighed and shook his head. "You just look like Tally to me." She looked down, her vision blurring. What's the matter?" Nothing, David." She shook her head. "You just took on five million years of evolution again." I what? Did I say something wrong?" No." She smiled. "You said something right.

*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.

Fern has Ugly Girl Syndrome.” Bailey said, out of the blue. “Also known as UGS … She grew up thinking she was ugly. She doesn’t realize that she shed the ugly a long time ago. She’s beautiful now. And she’s just as pretty on the inside, which is a side benny of UGS.

The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.

It's just programming" "No. It's because I love him

So, there was this beautiful princess. She was locked in a high tower(...)She was stuck up there(...)So the only thing was to jump.

But it's always taking a risk, when you ... kiss someone new.

However stupid the choice seemed, Shay had made it with her eyes open, and had respected Tally's choice to stay.

If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.

Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly.

Bubbly is bogus.

So what are those balloons for? In case you fall off your hoverboard?' -- Tally to Peris

You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody.

Or maybe when they do the operation- when they grind and stretch your bones to the right shape, peel off your face and rub all your skin away, and stick in plastic cheekbones so you look like everybody else- maybe after going through all that you just aren't very interesting anymore. -Shay, Uglies

That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly.

Where did you get that idea for a nose? - Frizz Mizuno

This whole game is just designed to make us hate ourselves

Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.

That was the whole point of being special: You existed to make sure everyone else behaved, but that didn't mean YOU had to.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man".

Personally, no matter how tempting it might be, I make it a policy not to surgically bestow near invincibility upon the people who would most like to see me dead.

Becoming pretty doesn't just change the way you look," she said. "No," David said. "It changes the way you think.

What about a hoverboard?" "It's waiting on the roof, of course." Dr. Cable snorted. "What is it about you miscreants and those things?

Q.= WHO AM I? WHO ARE YOU? U.G = You are what you are doing RIGHT NOW!

My God, woman. Your aura is glowing. Just admit you like him, bump uglies, and get on with your life!

Hoverboarding looks so fun, like being a bird. But actually doing it is hard work." Shay shrugged. "Being a bird's probably hard work too. Flapping your wings all day, you know?

Life doesn't come with an instruction manual.

You look beautiful - David

I'm Tally Youngblood. Make me pretty." -Tally Youngblood

The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call 'death.' It's a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead.

Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.

I'm not sure what I am anymore... Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me―a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures... That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed.

My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall....’ - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.

Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologised

Yes! is the thing that blows the whole structure apart.

Once we turn, it’s new pretty, middle pretty, late pretty.” Shay dropped her arms, and her board stopped drifting. “Then dead pretty.

Maybe human beings are programmed...to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad...

A messiah is the one who leaves a mess behind him in this world.

She'd never have to cut herself again. She carries a knife inside herself now, one that was always cutting her. She could feel it every time she swallowed, every time her thoughts strayed.

you're infamous, Tally. Everyone's terrified of you. The new system may have made the other cities nervous, but they seem to think my little gang of psychotic sixteen-year-olds is worse" - Cable to Tally

The physical beauty…also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

You and David could both be right. Maybe human beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other."-Zane

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.

Keep challenging the gods

That was one problem with dramatic exits: Sometimes they wound up making you look like a bubblehead.

You don't believe all that crap, do you - that there's one way to look, and everyone is programmed to agree on it?

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.

Sometimes Tally felt she could almost accept brain damage if it meant a life without reconstituted noodles.

As long as you are not at peace with yourself, it is not possible for you to be at peace with others.

freedom exists not in finding answers, but in the dissolution of all questions.

Okay... That's still blind-making.

Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Fuzzy Tally is no more.

Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.

There was something magic in their large perfect eyes, something that made you pay attention

A milli-Helen is enough beauty to launch exactly one ship

Tally-When you looked around at everyone else how come you didn’t notice they were brain damaged? Az - We didn’t have much to compare our fellow citizens with. Only a few colleagues who seemed different from most people, more engaged, but that was hardly a surprise. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep. Before the operation there were wars and mass hatred and clear cutting. Whatever these lesions make us, it isn’t a far cry from how humanity was in the rusty era. These days we’re just a bit easier to manage.

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of the other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable.

Controlling someone by changing their brain is like trying to stop a hovercar by digging a ditch. If they think hard enough, they can fly right over.

I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize -- that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize -- and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.

Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow.” Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.

And here's what I realized: You Sly Girls don't cry when you watch the big-face parties on the feeds, just because you weren't invited. You don't stay friends with people you hate, just to bump your face rank. And even though nobody knows what you're doing out here, you don't feel invisible at all. Do you? No one answered, but they were listening. Fame is radically stupid, that's all. So I want to try something else.

When you'r no longer identified with roles and labels and conventional definition of person

It's exciting. But you can't keep fighting the way things are forever.

She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods. "Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry." "Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?" Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way." "A week?" "That means seven days." "Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?" "Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before. He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.

The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not 'love' or feeling of brotherhood.

The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti

The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.

I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?

Sometimes we are so involved with our activity that we lose ourselves in it, and in that sense we are living in the moment.

Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers. "Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behend," David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it.

From now on, no one rewires my mind but me.

Two weeks of killer sunburn is worth a lifetime of being gorgeous

understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding -- now or tomorrow.

Who can tell me which president had a cross-eyed wife with a bad case of the uglies?” Chaney asked.

Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive.   It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: if I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed.

The demand to be prepared for all future actions and all situations is the cause of our problems. Every situation is so different; and our attempt to be prepared for all those situations is the one that is responsible for our not being able to deal with situations as they arise.

You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that

By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower. —Rabindranath Tagore, “Stray Birds

Bumped uglies?” I repeated on a laugh. “You are a retired phone sex operator and the best you can come up with is ‘bump uglies’? I’m disappointed in you.” “Gland to gland combat? Slytherin in the Hufflepuff? Doing the monster mash? Verbing the adjective noun?” I

Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.

As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.

I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.

If that idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.

So, there was this beautiful princess. She was locked in a high tower, one whose smart walls had cleaver holes in them that could give her anything: food, a clique of fantastic friends, wonderful clothes. And, best of all, there was this mirror on the wall, so that the princess could look at her beautiful self all day long. The only problem with the tower was that there way no way out. The builders had forgotten to put in an elevator, or even a set of stairs. She was stuck up there. One day, the princess realized that she was bored. The view from the tower--gentle hills, fields of white flowers, and a deep, dark forest--fascinated her. She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls. And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late. So the only thing was to jump. The hole in the wall gave her a lovely parasol to catch her when she fell, and a wonderful new dress to wear in the fields and forest, and a brass key to make sure she could get back into the tower if she needed to. But the princess, laughing pridefully, tossed the key into the fireplace, convinced she would never need to return to the tower. Without another glance in the mirror, she strolled out onto the balcony and stepped off into midair. The thing was, it was a long way down, a lot farther than the princess had expected, and the parasol turned out to be total crap. As she fell, the princess realized she should have asked for a bungee jacket or a parachute or something better than a parasol, you know? She struck the ground hard, and lay there in a crumpled heap, smarting and confused, wondering how things had worked out this way. There was no prince around to pick her up, her new dress was ruined, and thanks to her pride, she had no way back into the tower. And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful . . . or if the fall had changed the story completely.

Let’s be real, kids. The world sucks. Family sucks. And being expected to be eternally indebted to the people who bumped uglies and squirted you out? That sucks. You’re not beholden to anyone.

I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.

Maybe human beings are programmed to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other.

What the Motorcycle Said Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackerty-am-m, OM, AM: All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter- Am, the world’s my oyster. I hate plastic, wear it black and slick, hate hardhats, wear one on my head, That’s what the motorcycle said. Passed phonies in Fords, knockede down billboards, landed On the other side of The Gap, and Whee, bypassed history. When I was born (The Past), baby knew best. They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path, threw away their wrath. R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme, soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet are sh*t, and like that. Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love, hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad, that’s what the motorcycle said. Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies, Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be mean, tired, or unsexy. Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers, losers, went back to Nature and found how to get VD, stoned. Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, “I rolled our leaves of grass into one ball. I am the grassy All.” Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am: All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton- Am, the world’s my smilebutton.

You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.

My name’s Tally Youngblood,” she said. “Sorry to disturb you, but this is a special circumstance.

There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away, all that's left is some story in a history class.

I don't want to hurt you but I will if I have too

Ninety-nine percent of humanity had had something done to their brains, and only a few people in the world knew exactly what. •

La naturaleza, al menos, no necesitaba de operaciones para ser bella. Simplemente lo era.

When once we are freed from the goal [of solving problems], the question of whether it is a positive approach or a negative approach does not even arise.

The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty.

Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.

What I am emphasizing is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and trying to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem.

You don't actually know anything about that person or that thing, except what you are projecting on that object or the individual. The knowledge you have about it is the experience. It goes on and on. That's all. What that really is, you have no way of knowing.

Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.

Nobody knows anything about life and there is NO point in defining life.

—Al hacerte perfecto, tu aspecto no es lo único que cambia —concluyó Tally. —No —convino David—. También lo hace tu pensamiento.

Face it, Tally-wa, you're Special.

Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring.

The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body.

I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe we are acting. If you function that way (as puppets), then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that (the idea of) a "person" who is pulling those strings.

Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.

But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in its nature, into a pleasure movement.   There must be two, you know. I love somebody and somebody else loves me. Wherever there is division, there can’t be love. We are trying to bridge this gap, which is horrible for us, which has no meaning, which is demanding something from us, with this fancy idea that there must be love between these two individuals.

The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.

It's important to understand that the human brain is filled with meaningless chatter. Improperly trained or augmented, it jumps between reliving past humiliations and worrying over future hypotheticals. This can cause serious inadequacies when the need for decisive action arises in the present. There are, however, small evolutionary benefits to this chronological chaos. Those with no concern for the future often fail to prepare for it adequately...while those who cannot remember the past are...condemned to repeat it.

The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.

She stared at him, at his face. Simply stared as the scales fell from her eyes. "Oh, my God," she whispered, the exclamation so quiet not even he would hear. She suddenly saw-saw it all-all that she'd simply taken for granted. Men like him protected those they loved, selflessly, unswervingly, even unto death. The realization rocked her. Pieces of the jigsaw of her understanding of him fell into place. He was hanging to consciousness by a thread. She had to be sure-and his shields, his defenses were at their weakest now. Looking down at her hands, pressed over the nearly saturated pad, she hunted for the words, the right tone. Softly said, "My death, even my serious injury, would have freed you from any obligation to marry me. Society would have accepted that outcome, too." He shifted, clearly in pain. She sucked in a breath-feeling his pain as her own-then he clamped the long fingers of his right hand about her wrist, held tight. So tight she felt he was using her as an anchor to consciousness, to the world. His tone, when he spoke, was harsh. "Oh, yes-after I'd expended so much effort keeping you safe all these years, safe even from me, I was suddenly going to stand by and let you be gored by some mangy bull." He snorted, soft, low. Weakly. He drew in a slow, shallow breath, lips thin with pain, but determined, went on, "You think I'd let you get injured when finally after all these long years I at last understand that the reason you've always made me itch is because you are the only woman I actually want to marry? And you think I would stand back and let you be harmed?" A peevish frown crossed his face. "I ask you, is that likely? Is it even vaguely rational?" He went on, his words increasingly slurred, his tongue tripping over some, his voice fading. She listened, strained to catch every word as he slid into semi delirium, into rambling, disjointed sentences that she drank in, held to her heart. He gave her dreams back to her, reshaped and refined. "Not French Imperial-good, sound, English oak. You can use whatever colors you like, but no gilt-I forbid it." Eventually he ventured further than she had. "And I want at least three children-not just an heir and a spare. At least three-if you're agreeable. We'll have to have two boys, of course-my evil ugly sisters will found us to make good on that. But thereafter...as many girls as you like...as long as they look like you. Or perhaps Cordelia-she's the handsomer of the two uglies." He loved his sisters, his evil ugly sisters. Heather listened with tears in her eyes as his mind drifted and his voice gradually faded, weakened. She'd finally got her declaration, not in anything like the words she'd expected, but in a stronger, impossible-to-doubt exposition. He'd been her protector, unswerving, unflinching, always there; from a man like him, focused on a lady like her, such actions were tantamount to a declaration from the rooftops. The love she'd wanted him to admit to had been there all along, demonstrated daily right before her eyes, but she hadn't seen. Hadn't seen because she'd been focusing elsewhere, and because, conditioned as she was to resisting the same style of possessive protectiveness from her brothers, from her cousins, she hadn't appreciated his, hadn't realized that that quality had to be an expression of his feelings for her. Until now. Until now that he'd all but given his life for hers. He loved her-he'd always loved her. She saw that now, looking back down the years. He'd loved her from the time she'd fallen in love with him-the instant they'd laid eyes on each other at Michael and Caro's wedding in Hampshire four years ago. He'd held aloof, held away-held her at bay, too-believing, wrongly, that he wasn't an appropriate husband for her. In that, he'd been wrong, too. She saw it all. And as the tears overflowed and tracked down her cheeks, she knew to her soul how right he was for her. Knew, embraced, and rejoiced.