I think back to the nights I looked into your bright green eyes and you said,

"let's run away".

We cannot tear out a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.

I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to savor that moment, to live in that moment for a week. But I couldn't stop it, only slow it. And before I knew it, she was gone. After the door closed I felt like the last person on Earth.

I think I must be doing something horribly wrong, but I don't know what it is.

And eventually the sky did return and I was there outside in green

And I watched the world being reborn till 1am

So I thought I'd let you know it was beautiful

Slow-dancing to tunes of Billie Holiday

The city looked wonderful that way

And love just like blood will always stain

Most people are together just so they are not alone. But some people want magic. I think you are one of those people.

This is the haunting period. The time when the demons of regret come for you.

we're screaming at the top of our lungs

we are born so fresh, a golden prize

until you scraped that knee and quickly realized

that you're lost in a fog

In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer.

your mouth tastes perfectly like cigarettes

it’s okay, it is fine

there’s nothing, just one thing on our mind.

Saturday night,

the summers here

the sound of breath is in our ears

yes, the coast is completely clear

to wonder, we disappear.

I'm a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world.

I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away.

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

The man who dreams of artistry, and yet thinks it is necessary for someone else to lick him into shape, is a man whose art is doomed to mediocrity. If you're going to deliver the real goods, you've got to do your own licking into shape. Buck up ! Kick in ! Get onto yourself ! Don't squeal ! Don't tell me, or any other man how good you consider anything you've done, and that you think it is as good as somebody else's. Make your work so damned well better that you won't have time or thought to compare it with another man's mediocrity.

I am as closed-up and fucked-up as everybody else. I am hell. The world is hell. "No, it isn't", I scream, but I know it is. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Help. Help me. Help me. Love me.

Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

I know things get worse before they get better, but this is a worse that feels too big.

He knew the truth and was looking for something better.

I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

♥

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

I've forgotten more than you'll ever know.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like. It’s much easier not to know things sometimes. And to have French fries with your mom be enough.

I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.

He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship.

Someone once said a coward and a hero have one thing in common: fear. You may be scared, but you're no coward.

♥

The penny-candystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality

I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.

The changing light

at San Francisco

is none of your East Coast light

none of your

pearly light of Paris

The light of San Francisco

is a sea light

an island light

And the light of fog

blanketing the hills

drifting in at night

through the Golden Gate

to lie on the city at dawn.

An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden… You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.

“I feel there is an angel in me,” she'd say, “whom I am constantly shocking.” Then she would smile and look away.

For a brief time, I was here; and, for a brief time, I mattered.

Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck onto a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and moved and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass.