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Chris Pirsig
John is a friend of the narrator’s from Minneapolis. With his wife, Sylvia, John accompanies the narrator and Chris to Bozeman, Montana. John rides a BMW motorcycle that he has no interest in maintaining, and the narrator uses John’s emotion-based “romantic” perspective to contrast with the narrator’s own “classic” perspective.
John Sutherland Quotes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quotes below are all either spoken by John Sutherland or refer to John Sutherland. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That’s the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John’s dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. …
What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.
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John Sutherland Quotes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quotes below are all either spoken by John Sutherland or refer to John Sutherland. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That’s the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John’s dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. …
What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
