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Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.

Quentin S. Crisp

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Quentin S. Crisp
Age: 53
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Writer
Devonshire
Sense
Nature
Much
Influenced
Cosmic
Philosophy
Religion

More quotes by Quentin S. Crisp

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The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, My Zen cuts down mountains. My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains that is precisely how it felt to me.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I have a sense of them being Easter religions, for some reason. Christianity, of course, is a mystery religion, too, and I believe that Arthur Machen was one of those especially interested in the link between the pagan mysteries and the Christian ones. So, my experience was also a Machenesque experience.
Quentin S. Crisp
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Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.
Quentin S. Crisp
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[william] Burroughs, incidentally, took up the slogan that we are Here to go, which contradicts the tendency in Eastern mysticism to advocate staying where you are because there's nowhere to go anyway. I feel conflicted on this one.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I like the concept of an anti-muse, though I'm not quite sure what that is. If there is such a thing in my life, I suppose it is just this weariness, this sense that it is more fulfilling not to exist, to efface all traces, than to limit oneself to the determined expression of manifestation.
Quentin S. Crisp
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The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.
Quentin S. Crisp
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[Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.
Quentin S. Crisp
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People often refer to a creative ability as a 'gift', and, of course, it is, in that, if I had sat down and logically tried to work out who I was and what I should do, I would never have come up with the idea of writing. It was already there, gratis, a given - a gift.
Quentin S. Crisp
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More or less the first thing that comes into my head is that some people are always looking for what they want to do in life and never finding it. I'm not one of those people. It has been very obvious to me from an early age who I am, and this has been tied up with creativity, and, specifically, with writing.
Quentin S. Crisp
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We all know about the car breaking down on a deserted road scenario. That's cliché. I'm thinking more of Cider with Rosie, as in, the dark side.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.
Quentin S. Crisp
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She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable to feel most at home in autumn, besides which, she almost feels most at home in all of them.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
Quentin S. Crisp
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The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I'm not an expert here. I'm talking about an experience I had rather than something I intellectually worked out. From what I can gather, the original mystery religions are still, largely, as the name suggests, mysterious. But they are associated with intoxication, fertility and resurrection.
Quentin S. Crisp
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I think [imagination] very austere element of Buddhism is also linked with a strong antinatalist strain in the philosophy. The Buddha was enlightened when he destroyed the house of body and soul into which he would otherwise have been forever reborn. This is clearly antinatalism.
Quentin S. Crisp
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The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.
Quentin S. Crisp