‪A wise man once said, 'Life is like breathing. If you try to hold it, you'll lose it. But let it come & go & you'll always be connected to it.'‬

— Curtis Tyrone Jones

For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Deify Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Copper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.

— Joel Dinerstein

In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it.

— Alan W. Watts

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.

— Alan W. Watts