Nothing to keep, nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, and no concern about security: in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else; there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people round you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people's ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality wih bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain. [p.51]
But to reach the quality without a name, a building must be made, at least in part, of those materials which age and crumble. Soft tile and brick, soft plaster, fading coats of paint, canvas which has been bleached a little and torn by the wind,...fruit, dropping on the paths, and being crushed by people walking over it, grass growing in the cracks between the stones, an old chair, patched, and painted, to increase its comfort... [p.153]
Imagine, by contrast, a system of simple rules, not complicated, patiently applied, until they gradually form a thing. The thing may be formed gradually and built all at once, or built gradually over time -- but it is formed, essentially, by a process no more complicated than the process by which the Samoans shape their canoe.
Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes; only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps. [p. 161]
If you want to make a living flower, there is only one way to do it -- you will have to build a seed for the flower and then let it, this seed, generate the flower. [p.162]
However, in a period when languages are no longer widely shared, when people have been robbed of their intuitions by specialists, when they no longer even know the simplest patterns that were once implicit in their habits, it becomes necessary to make patterns explicit, precisely and scientifically, so that they can be shared in a new way -- explicitly, instead of implicitly -- and discussed in public. [p.246]
These two places have a little of the innocence and egolessness which is necessary to the quality without a name. And why? Because the people who made them simple do not care what other people think of them. I don't mean that they are defiant: people who defiantly don't care what other people think of them, they still care at least enough to be defiant -- and it is still a posture. [p.537]