Quotes from Robert Pirsig

there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed.

What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.

The past exists in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore unreal. Any intellectualy conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization process takes place. There is no other reality." ~ from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasureseeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot of will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society.

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these parries I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted.

If it appears to be the main route from a town to a city, that's bad. The best ones always connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker.

It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Consider a reevaluation of the situation, assuming it exists a blockage of our mind. The zero moment of the conscience is not the worst situation, but the best possible.(...). Our mind is empty, with a hollow and flexible disposition of beginners mind (…) Think, for a change, that this moment should be appreciated, and not feared. If our mind is really blocked, then we may be in a better situation than when it was overloaded with ideas.

Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started