Quotes About Simplicity

Unleavened Bread, all

When he took her home he ran the bath, which he had scrubbed clean---not an easy task---and they got into the tub together and drank strawberry milkshakes.

Why not? Bread was what you wanted over the long haul, when you got right down to it. When you got right down to it, you wouldn't want a lifetime of cake.

And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

A simple serpent! . . we used to call ourselves simple serpents. Civil serpents. Servants.

Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven. ~pg 8

Fucking bastards are simple by nature.

She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. … I want to work on my next book... and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read. I'm married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like living. It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise

If my mind is crowded with ideas or thoughts or plans or other people's creations there is less room for my own.

And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up.

From paradise to paradise I go sweeping; collecting rocks & views; owning nothing but what I feel.

And she realized she did not care. She did not need to know the name humans had given the flower. To herself she called it friend and from then on looked for it along the banks of the river and felt concern for it's health.

Jack is tall and kind and don't hardly say anything. Love children. Respect his wife, Odessa, and all Odessa amazon sisters. Anything she want to take on, he right there. Never talking much, though. That's the main thing. And then I remember one time he touch me. And it felt like his fingers had eyes. Felt like he knew me all over, but he just touch my arm up near the shoulder.

Let things taste of what they are.

When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.

As the wise Cicero said, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Remove the crown and the fine clothes, and you're left with a fairly ordinary man.

His goal now, he continued, was to write "just kind of songy songs that the milkman can whistle."4

Forget pleasure and Ambition

He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest.

Skin like ivory, perfect; A goddess, she must be. Slender fingers, unadorned; beautiful simplicity. A single teardrop; when did it fall? Could this goddess be mortal, after all?