Life is so fragile and unpredictable, especially when you are in a gang or in a life of crime. It__ like playing poker; you think to yourself that you have a good hand. However, it is only when you reveal your hand do you sometimes discover to your horror that someone else__ hand is better.

The subsistence mentality of a person is a prison in which his personal joy is detained. If you want to live in joy, you don't live for yourself alone. Live for others too!

Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?

Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.

I had spent many nights in the jungle looking for game, but this was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater. The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater's mercy. I lacked the courage to return to the village and admit I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night. As the grey dawn was lighting up the snowy range which Iwas facing, I rested my head on my drawn-up knees, and it was in this position my men an hour later found me fast asleep; of the tiger I had neither heard nor seen anything.

Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature__ wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve.