Steve Erickson > Quotes

“a dream is only a memory of the future”
― steve erickson

“If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.”
― Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight

“I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“Isn't it weird when that happens?' says Zazi. 'It's like the first time I heard the second Pete Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit--and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn't changed. The movie hasn't changed. It's still the same exact movie, but it's like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn't know you could understand, it's like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off--but when you don't it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that's been holding you back because when you hear a really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn't before, everything looks different, like what they say when you're in love or something--though I wouldn't know--but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that a novel could be. . .art could be. . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off.”
― Steve Erickson

“It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart's burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that's beneath love, not good enough for love.”
― Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn

“Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.”
― Steve Erickson

“When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.”
― Steve Erickson, American Nomad

“When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.”
― Steve Erickson, Arc d'X

“1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.”
― Steve Erickson

“Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.”
― Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight

“He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free.
Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.”
― Steve Erickson, Arc d'X

“You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive.”
― Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight

“But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder...”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.”
― Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn

“This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“Lets say from the first moment of my life, everything's always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let's say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith--this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise...Let's say I'm faithlessness made flesh, the modern age's leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment of compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully.”
― Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight

“Like all Americans, or like all Americans who are conscious of being American, Parker and Zema's father always believed he was his country. But lately he's come to realize that if he and his family didn't emerge unscathed from their American crisis, American faith in the early part of the twenty-first century didn't emerge at all. By the conclusion of the new century's first score of years, only those who have a stake in an American idea defined by wealth and power can still speak of that idea so shamelessly, since wealth and power is the only American idea left.”
― Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn

“The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“The obscure discovery of a reclusive mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten.”
― Steve Erickson, Arc d'X

“In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“Springsteen . . . was completely relevant and utterly anomalous at once, by way of a passion on the one hand that matched the punk moment, and a romanticism on the other hand that defied the postmodern moment.”
― Steve Erickson, American Nomad

“After her mother had disappeared, six-year-old Cutter began to have dreams. They were troubling dreams at first, inhabited by strange animals, tigers, jackals. Later dreams would seem like messengers with a single animal, a squirrel, a heron, creatures which did not bring terror into the night with them. When she was in her teens Cutter spent a dime at a carnival to have her palm read. The turbaned gypsy, faux or no, stroked a long painted nail along a smooth-banked river flowing across the luxuriant landscape of Cutter's hand and predicted such visitations as had already intruded into the girl's life.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“There it was . . . a missing day that lay between the thirty-first of December 1999, and the first of January 2000.”
― Steve Erickson, Arc d'X