The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply.
The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.
Now my inspiration but it won’t last and we’ll be just a photograph – i.
You don’t sell a film by saying you won’t show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his own sanity but that won’t go down in Hollywood, Mister.
The aim of education is the knowledge, not the facts, but of values.
If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convulsions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of its unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery.
How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’?
I deplore brutality, he said, It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt.
This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.
Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.
This planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave.
I could have been a successful bank robber, gangster, business executive, psychoanalyst, drug trafficker, explorer, bullfighter, but the conjecture of circumstances was never there. Over the years I begin to doubt if my time will ever come. It will come, or it will not come. There is no use trying to force it. Attempts to break through have led to curbs, near disasters, warnings. I cultivate an alert passivity, as though watching an opponent for the slightest sign of weakness.
Here we are in plague-stricken New York? Airborne AIDS, is it? And you figure to levitate your way out.
Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.
Itinerant short con and carny hype men have burned down the croakers of Texas .
As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.
The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park. The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Big Foot, Green Deer exist always growing thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breath in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels, and Hiltons and McDonald’s, the whole magical universe is dying.
A Cross roads of Space – Time travel, winds of change and death, dispersion. A waiting room – where you grab a quick drink – before your train leaves. Cold fear of being left alone in the waiting room after all the trains had left.
And all that I was before is out there in the darkness looking for me.