Brad Phillips > Quotes

“I've already said an addict is a person with holes. These holes are either congenital, shot out, or carved and eaten away at until what remains is this thing, the hole. The hole can never be filled. The thing most likely to fill the hole is love, but love is fleeting, unreliable, conditional. Drugs are unconditional.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“To be close to me is also to learn how to cope--to cope with how I cope.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“weekend at bernie's is not a realistic movie”
― brad phillips

“It seems universally accepted that the ocean and its unrelenting tide is a source of comfort and peace. The Pacific Ocean is, after all, named the Pacific. I myself find it boring. But boredom is a kind of comfort, and a modern luxury. Boredom can be pacifying. What does the ocean really do, but deliver one predictable wave after another? In this way it’s like life. Every morning my body wakes, crunches, shits, cries out for food. Then it aches and moves and works and tires, eats and sleeps again, setting up the same for the following morning. This is a kind of tide. It isn’t calming or pacific.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“More than anything in this world, trauma has been the source behind the greatest acts of transformation and creativity.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“Roll gently onto your back for me, and know my teeth are made of feathers.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“I’m not used to being touched. My particular sexual behavior precludes allowing myself to be handled softly or lovingly. It breaks the fourth wall. But I could use it now. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I feel like I need to write these things down because I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to. I love my sister, I love one of my ex-girlfriends, I love my two best friends, I love my mother.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“The dead are always available to us, just not how we'd prefer.”
― Brad Phillips