I can’t blame her. but wonder why she’s here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned?
It seemed better to delay thinking.
People don’t do me much good.
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you’re frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.
Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.
I’m not the cruel type, but they are, and that’s the secret.
Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.
It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one’s self, like a fingernail.
Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.
Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.
The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.
I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.
Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.
I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me, I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.
I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.
You were destroyed by what you befriended.
I’m going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I’ll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.
And there I was, 225 pounds, perpetually lost and confused, short legs, ape-like upper body, all chest, no neck, head too large, blurred eyes, hair uncombed, 6 feet of geek, waiting for her.
When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.