If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Some things take so long / But how do I explain / When not too many people / Can see we're all the same? / And because of all their tears / Their eyes can't hope to see / The beauty that surrounds them / Isn't it a pity? (George Harrison)

I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move. (Tennyson)

If the red slayer think he slays, / Or if the slain think he is slain, / They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again. (Emerson)

But if the arrow is straight / And the point is slick / It can pierce through dust no matter how thick (Dylan)

…If eyes were made for seeing, / then Beauty is its own excuse for being (Emerson)

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves / With my pencil turning moments into line (Brian Eno, John Cale)

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds / Have rived the knotty oaks; and I have seen / The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, / To be exalted with the threatening clouds; / But never till to-night, never till now, / Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. (Shakespeare)

Oh, I dream a highway back to you, love / A winding ribbon with a band of gold / A silver vision come and rest my soul / I dream a highway back to you (Gillian Welch)

But where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain / Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign. (Shakespeare)

…always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey / I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (W. B. Yeats)

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite. (Juliet)

I'm organising a prison break. I'm looking for, like, an accomplice. We'd have to first get out of this bar, then the hotel, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out? (Lost in Translation)

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. (Melville)

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind. (Keats)

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn / Falcon (Hopkins)

He took the golden compasses, prepared in God’s eternal store, to circumscribe this universe, and all created things (Milton, PLVII)

Do not fill in this vacant hole. It is awaiting a new plant. Thanks.

The music Pythagorean, one note at a time / Connecting the heavenly spheres, / While I leaned against the bar surveying the premises / Through cigarette smoke. (Charles Simic)

How you sound is / who you are / like drumsound (Keorapetse Kgositsile)

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (T.S. Eliot)

…the swan with arched neck between her white wings mantling proudly, rows her state with oary feet (Milton, PL VII)

Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original fire / Arising out of the emptiness. / It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. / It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. / Shooting stars. (Charles Wright)

The supreme lesson of Turner and the spiritual message of Zen painting have come to me. (André Masson)

Through the city’s melted furnace unexpectedly we watched with faces hidden as the walls were tightening. (Dylan, Chimes of Freedom)

Somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail, bouncing over a white cloud, killing the blues. (Rowland Salley)

…coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl. (Heaney, Churning Day)

He stood in his room and started with a short burst of notes, and then sought the tone he’d felt inside him, but which he couldn’t match by blowing. (Frank London Brown, Jazz)

You dozed, and watched the night revealing / The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted (T.S. Eliot)

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis // It was a dream I had last week / And some kind of record seemed vital. / I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem / But I loved the title. (Wendy Cope)

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night. (REM)

BILLIE HOLIDAY / Holds a microphone / Close to the moon. (Lawson Fusao Inada)

And far into the night he crooned that tune. / The stars went out and so did the moon. / The singer stopped playing and went to bed / While the Weary Blues echoed through his head / He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead. (Langston Hughes)

…and he could sleep; if sleep it may be called by men, resting his mind in the strange paths of Elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world. (JRR Tolkein)

In this age of grand illusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams (Bowie, Word on a Wing)

He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. "I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began," he said to me. And also: "My dreams are like other people's waking hours.” (Borges)

Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition. (Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape)

All drains lead to the ocean, kid. (Finding Nemo)

Hey, you, Cyclops! Idiot! The crew trapped in your cave did not belong to some poor weakling. Well, you had it coming! You had no shame at eating your own guests! So Zeus and others have paid you back. (Odysseus)

Wood is such a blessing to humanity (David Lynch)

My yoke is easy and my burden is light (Jesus)

All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments (Walt Whitman)

One man’s toxic sludge is another man’s potpourri (The Grinch)

Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells (Dylan)