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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.