33 Quotes by John Verdon

That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.

Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.

Nothing leaves you more vulnerable to your past than the illusion that you’ve dealt with it.

The personal collisions that upset us the most, the ones we seem powerless to let go of, are those in which we played a role that we are unwilling to acknowledge. That’s why the pain lasts – because we refuse to look at its source. We cannot detach it, because we refuse to look at the point of attachment.

Normally the thought that someone had paid seventy-five thousand dollars to ride around in a giant toaster would have made him smile.

At times like this he always recalled, uneasily, that everyone on earth at a particular latitude sees the same stars in the sky. But no two cultures see the same constellations. He’d seen evidence of the phenomenon again and again: The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.