Quentin S. Crisp Quotes - Page 3

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• I don't want to give too much away, but something horrible happens in 1977. That was also the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. I remember this jubilee. I remember receiving a commemorative coin from the school. I think it was a fifty pence piece. That was its monetary value, but it was not a normal fifty pence piece, and it would have been strange to try and use it in a shop.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Queens, School, Thinking

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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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

  Hangover, Feels, Ran

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Loss, Oil, Scandal

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• 1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Years, Movement, Jubilee

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• When I think back on it, I have a sense of relaxation, as if in the seventies no one had to try to be anyone other than who they were. I'm sure that's not really true, but that's how I remember it, and I suppose it might be relatively true.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, Relaxation, Trying

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Phones, People, Diaries

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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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

  Philosophy, Thinking, Who I Am

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Running, Meditation, Answers

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Vegetarianism, Years

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, Race, Hopeful

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, Able, Seventies

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Innocence, Longing, Lost

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I mean, in 1979 I was seven. I do remember punk, though, as a playground phenomenon, and remember that it was exciting to us. It really was, to a five- or six-year-old, quite a thrilling enticement to revolt. The anarchy sign scratched in desk tops, and so on.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Mean, Years, Six Year Olds

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• This is the strange thing about existing in time. As [Philip] Larkin puts it, "truly, though our element is time, we are not used to the strange perspectives open at each moment of our lives" - something like that.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Perspective, Elements, Strange

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• To me the seventies represent normality, and, of course, it is a normality that is now anachronistic.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Courses, Seventies, Normality

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Earth, Innocence, Imagine

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I went on a meditation retreat. In 10 or so days, I spent about a hundred hours meditating, observing 'noble silence' the whole time, and so on. This was an interesting experience, which has had some beneficial effects for me.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Interesting, Meditation, Silence

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I feel a little as if the Buddhism is creeping back, but I mention all this simply in order to illustrate that there is, in my life, a fundamental sense of conflict between something that I am calling 'Buddhism' and my creative impulse.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhism, Order, Creative

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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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

  Buddhism, Cutting, Rejection

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I began researching and writing what I intended as a book-length essay entitled Fascination and Liberation, exploring the question of whether there is a conflict between creativity and the Eastern form of enlightenment. I don't know if I'll ever finish that essay, because I had an experience, after I'd written two or three chapters, in which it seemed to me that my psychic antibodies decisively rejected Buddhism. Interestingly, the rejection felt as if it happened in Zen terms.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Book, Writing, Creativity

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Children, Father, Philosophy

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• Nonetheless, I'm not sure this entirely accounts for my Buddhist voice, which tells me forever to give up writing, to give up on relationships, simply to give up. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to me to be the voice of innocence.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Buddhist, Giving Up, Writing

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I never went to church as a child. I did not .

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Children, Church

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• The urban, on the other hand, is often seen as more real and mundane, even though it is obviously far more recent in terms of planetary development. I think this might be because nature corresponds to the unconscious and the artificial world of the city and human culture to the conscious mind.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Real, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, People, Natural

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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