Koan Quotes

“And what we’ve been always been is…?”“Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”“Course not, it’s a koan.”

“What is your original face, before your mother and father were born?”

“Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.”

“Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.”

“born born everything is always bornthinking about it try not to”

“clouds very high looknot one word helped them get up there”

“I'd love to give you somethingbut what would help?”

“that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it getsI wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind”

“it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?”

“Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.”