Peter Coyote > Quotes

“When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.”
― Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

“If success could heal, why do so many celebrity marriages end in divorce and celebrated artists wind up in rehab or the morgue? Why do people with a firm grip on the world's tail take their own lives or pursue suicidally risky behaviors?”
― Peter Coyote

“[I]t is the folly of a young man to believe that he can pick and choose between what Love and Power offer him, keeping only the Light and leaving behind the Shadows.”
― Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

“We're the gentle people, sweetheart. We're the losers!...it's what makes us stronger, in a way.”
― Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

“people astray and into potentially horrific acts. Both of these views relate to the world that is delivered to us by our senses. There is a third way that Buddhist practitioners know as “Emptiness.” This is the unseen, formless energy that extrudes itself as the myriad forms of the world, creating and then retrieving them back to the source. Suzuki Roshi suggested that we think of it as the white screen in a movie theater, the unseen background against which the shimmering movie of”
― Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

“Hindsight has taught me that there is a ravenous, invisible twin haunting each of us. Despite “good works” and selfless sacrifice for noble causes, without unremitting vigilance, even tiny indulgences will betray high aims and deflect nourishment to this parasitic companion. Unfortunately, not even hindsight frees us from the consequences of such indulgence. Emmett”
― Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

“Part of the power and flexibility of of our profit-oriented economy is that it can co-opt nearly everything. Everything but doing things for free”
― Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle