Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.

I myself don't like to speak to the actors at all. I like to hire great people and let them do their thing. I don't like to speak to them. I don't like to have lunch with them. I don't like to socialize with them. I don't like to hear their ideas.

We live in a silent explosion, Everything is flying away from everything else... flying away... flying away...

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

The most difficult part for me is feeling connected to the people that I love but always being on the go to different places.

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Distance does not break off the friendship absolutely, but only the activity of it.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

Our faces were no more than ten inches apart but she was lightyears away from me.

I think that occasionally running away and crashing where people can't find you is important.

I love the life of an actor because you spend brief amounts of time with other people and then you just leave. I need to be alone a lot, and I need the outdoors.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

Life sometimes separates people so that they can realize how much they mean to each other.

Proximity doesn't breed familiarity.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.

Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their good and our evil, let us forget all things save that we are together and that there is joy as a bond between us. Give us your hand. Look ahead. It is our own world, Golden One, a strange, unknown world, but our own.

Face to face, just you and me, with no rules. Just like you, I get lonely too.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

People say, 'Are you afraid? Are you scared for your life?' and I tell them: If I choose today to tone it down, if I choose today to shut up, tomorrow me, you, and all of us will be forced to.

I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. -Susie Salmon

Five thousand people in one society might do something, but five thousand societies of one member each would be a holy trouble.

Sherlock Holmes becomes more human and more adept at fitting in with a lot of people, but he remains separate from the human race because he finds that a better place to observe that from. He stays on the mountain top because there, he can see clearly.