Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
Rating: (60.7K votes)
“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Put your good where it will do the most!”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“You're either on the bus or off the bus.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“If you label it this, then it can't be that.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“it is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Dear Mother,
I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity by name, but they were more and more attuned to the principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one could see the larger pattern and move with it - Go with the flow! - and accept it and rise above one's immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and growing with it.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“... somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow ... you've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way...”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes if you are the most alert person alive and most people are a lot slower than that.... You can't go any faster than that... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1 30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been set up. Suddenly they found each other.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“An LSD experience without the LSD" -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
“Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations.”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
Born place: in Richmond, Virginia, The United States
Born date March 2, 1931
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