Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe Quotes

“Go to the community and the locations that have set a sparkle in your psyche. That's how you find your Tribe”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“As a Wrong Planet person you may at times appear to be unsociable. You’re often dispassionate when it comes to the activities of others because they seem so mediocre to you. You sometimes find it disappointing to make friends with people who you just can’t relate to. And because of this from time to time you find yourself alone, although you don’t mind this. It’s simply that people don’t always cut it for you”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I’m not interested in hearing from those who preach joy or talk such crap about ‘positivity pledges’ about not allowing negative thoughts to drain them of energy, or about sending vibes of positive energy into the world and being grateful for all the wonderful things it’s going to attract into lives.
That stuff’s all well and good, except that most people who talk shit like this are as fake as Katie Price’s boobs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Gypsies have no boundaries. They have primitive, untamed personalities and 'that look in their eyes.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“For the Gypsy, it’s moments in time that count, not interpretations or rhetorical questions or resolutions or justifications, and not even the journey’s end, for the journey never ends. Just moments in time. They are born for disappearing”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“It’s plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we’re literary Gypsies, all of us, and it’s only recently that we’re starting to realise we’re not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I’ve always loved wild people.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There’s a huge difference between the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen and the rest of society in that no one understands us.

It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.

It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

No one understands us”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“By the 'best minds' Ginsberg meant the dropouts, poets, musicians and world travellers, as opposed to doctors and lawyers. He understood that Wrong Planet people tend to pick up better communication skills, have greater visualisation, and can adapt to changing circumstances quicker than Rag, Tag & Bobtail.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The Gypsies favour hazardous and threatening freedom over serene and tranquil servitude any day of the week.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There is nothing more annoying than somebody who is really thick but who believes with absolute conviction that he is more intelligent than you. In other words, they tend to be very self-contained, introspective and deep down they’re probably striving for affection. Yet they have no way of going about attaining this, so they tend to rub people up the wrong way.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Choose carefully. Avoid Rag, Tag & Bobtail. Avoid those who play it safe. They won’t offer a helping hand, and they can’t advise you. They’re boring, and that’s just about all that can be said about them. They are dead and obsolete. That’s it. They exist, they happen, but they don’t actually live.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“A life coach? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything, does it?

So they ‘coach’ people on how to live their lives? Why don’t they mind their own fucking business? They only call themselves life coaches because they can’t get a job. Because they’re unemployable. And they haven’t got any qualifications either. Do you think they went to Uni to study life coaching? Of course they didn’t.

And who do they coach anyway? Do people go to them and ask to be coached on their lives? I hardly think so. They’d see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or someone with a bit of clout, wouldn’t they?

They don’t coach anybody at all, do they? They’ve made it all up.

So, there you have it. At the bottom end of the otherworldly, metaphysical scale, even less developed spiritually than Orphans or Horace, are Life Coaches.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The problem you and I have, as Wrong Planet people, is not so much that we mean everything we say, but we expect that everyone else does to.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The Gypsies are living poetry”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Your soul may well consist of artists and artisans, crooks and charlatans, writers and wanderers, poets and performers, vagabonds and visionaries, cigar box jugglers and contortionists, sword swallowers, storey-tellers and snake worshippers, fire eaters and fire dancers, human cannonballs, treasure hunters, swashbuckling pirates, pilgrims, Bedouin tribesmen and Gypsies. Everything that’s rash and wild inside of you is striving for freedom. And I’m not asking for this to hit you like an epiphany. It’s not supposed to. But if you read that list of misfits above and gave just the tiniest of nods – even at a deep subliminal level – then you understand”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I write in my head on the way home from work, or when mowing the lawn, or on a night out with friends. Sometimes I find the time to capture those words that are rolling through my mind, quivering and drumming and swimming, banging into each other until I can finally trick them and leak them out onto the page. And sometimes I don't. Writers are like that”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I always like to think of Neal Cassady as being representative of the tarot card The Fool, which displays him at the outset of his journey with unlimited potential. The card also shows him about to step off a cliff and it’s clear he hasn’t planned things properly. He’s got a bag with him that contains all he needs, but he’s not bothering to open it. In his left hand he’s holding a white rose, which represents purity and righteousness. He’s got a little white dog with him, who’ll protect him on his journey, but will push him to learn life’s lessons.

The Fool represents crazy wisdom, for his journey may well be to discover advanced and contemporary ideas, new frames of reference, shocking concepts, knowledge or viewpoints. The Fool has holy curiosity.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“♪♫ no one’s gonna play this on the radio ♫♪ Billy Joel

So why’s he wasting his time? Because he loves the music, that’s why. And he’s not wasting his time is he? He’s following his dream, doing what he loves. Perhaps if more of us followed our dreams – really followed our own dreams, not someone else’s nutty ideology - the world might be a nicer place to reside in.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I call the polar opposites to Wrong Planet people Rag, Tag & Bobtail because they’re really nothing but glove puppets. Their heads are little more than hollow wood and at times they seem to be controlled by strings and rods and levers with invisible hands inside them making them ‘perform.’ Most glove puppets have fixed facial expressions and a hinged mouth, giving them a dull, lifeless expression.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“We’re all familiar with the Hippie dress code. Long hair, beards, psychedelic colours, sandals, lots of beads, and the women could often be seen wearing long, flowery granny dresses. So much so in fact that it became a uniform. Hippies rebelled so much against inflexible dress codes that eventually they created their own rigid styles.

Hippies mutinied so much against conformity that over the course of time they were forced to play the game and comply with what everyone else was wearing. The counter-culture became a counter-counter-culture.

Everyone was the same”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“You feel as if your Earthwalk is a mission of some sorts, but you can’t quite remember what that mission is, and whatever it is you don’t seem to be accomplishing it. In other words, you’re a little bit disheartened. And maybe a little touched.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Within the history of lesbianism from the archaic Greek poet Sappho from the Isle of Lesbos, who is the symbol of lust, passion and sensuality between women, to Sister Benedetta Carlini’s deeply erotic love affair with another nun, to the 10th century Arab erotic work, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which gives the account of a love affair between a Christian and an Arab woman, to modern day same-sex marriages and Pride parades, there is certainly place for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The black sheep? You and I are more like the tie-dyed sheep!”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The joining of humans and Djinni in marriage is still practiced in some parts of the world, and the Queen of Sheba was rumoured - by both the Jews and the Arabs - to be part Djinn.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The original Hippies were cool because it was who they were. But the ‘movement’ grew in numbers because it became the 'in thing’ to do. And sad as it is, most of them were plastic Hippies. The original Beatniks did what they did not because they were ‘hip’ but because it was who they were as a person. These were Carefree Scamps, but the plastic Hippies weren’t carefree at all

And besides that, they smelled like an Oxfam shop”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“These do-gooders, these life coaches who surround themselves with fake friends evangelise about a blissful life without struggle, but is a life without combat really worth living? True love, for instance, is hard. And it isn’t fair. And it really hurts like hell sometimes. True love comes out of chaos”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The Warrior fights before he’s taught how. He just fights, and if you hit him he steps forwards towards you”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I truly believe it’s possible for people who are quite nuts to function on this planet and hold down responsible positions in the field of endeavour and work. They’ll often be cheerful chappies, capable but quite batty. For the most part they’re just cheerful dickheads”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“This was an era where you were defined by the music you listened to and the clothes you wore. You wouldn’t find a skinhead listening to King Crimson, or a Rocker listening to blue beat or reggae. It wasn’t allowed.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe