SD > SD's Quotes

“A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.”
― Dante

“I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere.

From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.”
― Jerry Stahl

“Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.”
― Jerry Stahl, Perv - A Love Story

“Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.”
― Jim Thompson

“If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it.”
― Boyd Rice, NO

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.”
― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks