I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.
when you see a crazy one walking in the street honor him but leave him alone. stand out of the way. there's no luck like that luck nothing else so perfect in the world let him walk untouched remember that Christ also was insane.
It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreen, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans . . .
Dante's Christian hell is an after-life of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can't participate in it. You're forever a stranger from your own life because there's something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.
