I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

When a man's only assets are the brain in his head and the tongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decides to open that mouth and speak.

Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.

But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.

What else we know? Nothing. That s why we re sitting together in this car now. Because we re the same, and because we don t know a damn thing other than that.

It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known

In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.

Imagine knowing that you're good at something, so good that the world would be in awe of you if they could see your work, and then keeping yourself a secret from the world.

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.

To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to destroy the second.

He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can be done about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don't. And if you do, you can't be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don't, you never will again.

Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why? because they are hungier than we are. because they know what they want. because they believe in life more than we do.

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.

You had to invent something. It's not possible to leave it blank. The mind won't let you.

You must get used to doing with as little as you can. By wanting less, you are content with less, and the less you need, the better off you are.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said.

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death

Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed against the stones.

...the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence,to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being.

By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was.

... that once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances.

We are all aliens to ourselves.

Real love...is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him.

I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. Each day is new, and each day I am born again. I see hope everywhere, even in the dark, and when I die, I will perhaps become God.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty?

But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

A crisscross of light and shadow began to form on the pavement in front of him, and it was a beautiful thing to behold, he felt, a small, unexpected gift on the heels of such sadness and pain.

Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Piss on earth, good will toward none.

Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.

Times i think u were the most cherished trophy i had, but sometimes i think i was the game that you played.

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