He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.
World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
When he died he would not end. The world would end.
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.
Freud is finished, Einstein’s next.
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
It was important for him to believe that he’d spent his life among people who kept missing the point.
There is a world inside the world.
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it’s enough to make me proud to be an American.
Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I’m a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.
I don’t want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.
Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.