Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Metadata

• Author: [[Robert M. Pirsig]]
• Full Title: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Category: #books

Highlights

• Tate explained that James was able to achieve this magic through the use of the first-person narrator. Tate said that the first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can’t get out. He can’t say “meanwhile, back at the ranch” as a transition to another subject because he is imprisoned forever inside the narrator. But so is the reader! And that is the strength of the first-person narrative. The reader does not see that the governess is the villainess because what the governess sees is all the reader ever sees. (Location 73)
  • Tags: [[perspective]] [[writing]]
• The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. (Location 150)
• We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. (Location 179)
• The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. (Location 354)
• argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. (Location 377)
• I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies 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 in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it. (Location 384)
• Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. (Location 503)
• When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. (Location 506)