“I had lost some of my naivete and gained strength. These women with th...” — Shan Sa Quote

“I had lost some of my naivete and gained strength. These women with their pointless scheming could not contain me, and I watched the volatile world of the gynaeceum with a detached eye. The Forbidden City had buried my youth, and in the monastery, I had died and come back to life. Friends, enemies and mistresses had all disappeared. I was a ghost from a lost world, still going from one season to the next and still living for one man alone.”

“I talk to trees and animals. We have interesting conversations about food, weather, and love. They sometimes can predict the future.”

“I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.”

“Politicians are better liars than writers.”

“Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.”

“My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.”

“Move just, move”

“[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods”

“Life should be measured with product”