Leellen Patchen Quotes

I want to buy me a hat with a golden feather & a book with the confessions of God in it ~ Kenneth Patchen

It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Nobody's a long time. ~ Kenneth Patchen

There are so many little dyings How do we know which one of them is death? ~ Kenneth Patchen

Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Humanity is a good thing. Perhaps we can arrange the murder of a sizable number of people to save it. ~ Kenneth Patchen

What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Why should anyone be surprised at what the men "in power" are capable of --didn't every mad-Judas one of them begin his career by slowly & brutally strangling an innocent child? ~ Kenneth Patchen

Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest? ~ Kenneth Patchen

Live for One day instead to die every day.
Work is worship
Do or die. ~ Nancy Patchen

I can assure you that God did not put us here to amass piles of riches and wealth. He put us here to learn…. and some of life's greatest lessons are realized when you have nothing left to give. ~ Jacob Paul Patchen

People don't want to be healed. They want a nice juicy wound that will show well when they put neon lights around it. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist. ~ Kenneth Patchen

The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it. ~ Kenneth Patchen

I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Any who live, stand alone in one place, together. ~ Kenneth Patchen

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves. ~ Jack Nicholson

Modern scientific accomplishments" --a wealth of methods coupled with a poverty of intentions which, having nearly exhausted the hell-potential of the earth, move on now to the first frontier of the heavens. ~ Kenneth Patchen

I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing. ~ Kenneth Patchen

I think people need a little joy and humor as well as commitment in their lives ~ Kenneth Patchen

That which is not daring is nothing. ~ Kenneth Patchen

You will protect with the last drop of someone else's blood what was never yours. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Flying is the easy part; it's the landing that takes tenacity. ~ Jacob Paul Patchen

Why shouldn't you think it's crazy to believe in a green deer? All your life you have been taught to believe in only what you can use-to set on the table, to put in the bank, to build a house with. What possible use would a green deer be to anyone? Who would believe in a man with a blazing bush in his cart? Then let me tell you that it is beliefs just such as these that are the only hope of the world. Let me tell you that until men are ready to believe in the green deer and the strange carter, we shall not lift our noses above the bloody mess we have made of our living ~ Kenneth Patchen

It is fully practical to create that which has form in the silence. The noise art makes is usually heard by those whose lives listen to god. It is not adviseable to cheat that which has no other stake than the deeps and brights of all man. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humility ... A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Faith springs from understanding. It is a conviction that grows from understanding. ~ Nancy Freeman Patchen

Do I not deal with angels When her lips I touch. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stone

Man is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a love

Man is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fire

There is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own need

And we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of it

The eye in the leaf is watching out of our fingers
The ear in the stone is listening through our voices
The thought of the wave is thinking in our dreams
The faith of the seed is building with our deaths ~ Kenneth Patchen

The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind. ~ Kenneth Patchen

The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Out of slavery, freedom --yes, & roses from the pig's behind. ~ Kenneth Patchen

All at Once Is What Eternity Is. ~ Kenneth Patchen

Law and order embrace on hate's border. ~ Kenneth Patchen

I got the fat poet into a corner and told him he was writing shit and couldn't get away with it

Now it is night and time
for sleep. Everyone is
tired

from garbage-glutting
lifting their snouts
from the trough
long enough
to ease their gut -
I won't urge the point.

Gold-plated poems
to stuff up
their mind's ass

or politics
watered down so as
not to scare the blue bloods
Boo! you well-fed bastards ~ Kenneth Patchen

She smiled like a story entering the mind of a cat. ~ Kenneth Patchen The Journal Of Albion Moonlight

Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful. ~ Kenneth Patchen

This is the evening of the two-fisted prayer ~ Kenneth Patchen

Stirred...the fur-toothed graves of young boys...a thousand slain in the time it would take to do love with a pretty girl or think of a new God. ~ Kenneth Patchen