I started to get extremely, extremely depressed. I’m sure part of it was due to the hashish.

I never would have thought being high in a zoo would lead to that.

Dream not...of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.

I never thought before my death to see Youth's vision thus made perfect.

I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened.

I was at a party. Some guy gave me some shit. He's like, "Here, man. Take this. It's fucking mushrooms." I took it, I forgot all about it, you know. Then a couple days later I found that shit in my pocket. I'm thinking, "why not?" 'Cuz I'm thinking it's like weed. Some background shit. I planned my whole day out like it was weed. "I'll chew this shit up, then I'll go to the barbershop, get my hair cut and then I'll see a movie." I chewed it up. So far, so good. Then I was in the barbershop, like an hour later. And it's funny, 'cuz I was just thinking to myself, like, "Ooh, this stuff sucks. Tastes like athlete's foot. I feel sick, but I'm not really high." Then I looked in the mirror. I saw the barber's reflection. Man, it looked like a big penis was cutting my hair.

"The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time — dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoke puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems "to have something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.

I did not imagine I would be where I am, not at all.

When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two -- and didn't like it -- and didn't inhale and never tried inhaling again.

I never imagined I could feel such emotions as the ones I was experiencing then. It was like a dream, one I had never had before.

I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them.

As a lifelong habit of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy...

I didn’t just experiment with marijuana — if you know what I mean.

"We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It's a natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs. But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.
I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, "No, no, no, David, don't you take those drugs." I was pretty lucky.
Besides, far more profound experiences are available naturally. When your consciousness stars expanding, those experiences are there. All those things can be seen. It's just a matter of expanding that ball of consciousness. And the ball of consciousness can expand to be infinite and unbounded. It's totality. You can have totality. So all those experiences are there for you, without the side effects of drugs."