Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.
It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.
Come alive, dead heart, and sing.
The two main girlfriends he has had wanted him to support them in the manner to which they certainly weren’t accustomed even though he couldn’t put his flabby hands on a penny.
I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.
I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious.
She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.
All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she’s a total freak. The kid’s beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you’re worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don’t know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.
I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for hours. All land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it’s becoming harder to get off the roads.
Dear David, Are you a Tibetan monk yet? I used to hate you because you didn’t love me so much you would give up your whole life for me. I expect this of every man. In retrospect, I realize that I was also selfish: I should have stopped making demands that you not be the closet female-hating sadist you are.
Without language the only people the rebels can kill are themselves.
When the word ends, there’ll be no more air. That’s why it’s important to pollute the air now.
I’m sick of this society. “Earn a living” as if I’m not yet living; lobotomized and robotized from birth, they tell me I can’t do anything I want to do in the subtlest and sneakiest ways possible. They want to erase all possible hints that I’ve been born. I have two centers: love and my desire to sleep.
Even if we die, if we have to become monsters and everyone hates us, we have to read the book because it will teach us how to avoid the alligator’s jaws, the wolves who wait in the forest, the huge snakes, and how to become birds.
Glory be to those humans that are absolutely NOTHING for the opinions of other humans: they are the true owners of illusions, transformations, and themselves.
Intense sexual desire is the best thing in the world.
Maps are dreams: both describe desire, where you want to go, but never the reality of the destination.
Even if I do attain some goal, at that very moment the only thing that’s important to me is to go beyond that which is no longer a goal but now only a stage.
All my life I’ve dreamt dreams that, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath.
There’s no more education, no more culture – if culture depends on a commonly understood history – and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There’s War.
We live by the images of those we decide are heroes and gods.