Nino Ricci Quotes & Sayings

He was starting to think that consciousness wasn't some lighthouse of self-knowing but merely a little cave where you made up stories about yourself, whatever it took to hide the shit and the slime, the utter mollusk you were in your deepest nature. He wondered what was down there, under the shit, what kind of bedrock he might strike. Take — Nino Ricci

He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations. — Nino Ricci

A booby woos his mate with a story of abundance; a bee dances out a story of food. Whatever line we draw between instinct and awareness does not change that the story is there from the outset, long before there are poets to recite it or scribes to record it. So it is that what we still think of as our unique heritage, the thing that sets us apart, what the gods have given us, the magic moment of "Let there be light," is perhaps only a passage on a much longer journey, one that is primal beyond reckoning and that goes back to the very beginnings of life itself. — Nino Ricci