Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

The police start chasing you, but you just drive faster. It’s easier to run than to explain.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.

I guess I’m pretty much of a lone wolf. I don’t say I don’t like people at all but, to tell you the truth, I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.

Now I forget how to think
so crack my skull
rearrange me

Jesus christ you have confused me
Cornered, wasted, blessed and used me
Forgive me girls I am confused
Stiff and pissed and lost and loose

You're out of reach
Saw you early this morning
With your brand new boy and your Cadillac
Saw you early this morning
With your brand new boy and your Cadillac
You're gone for something
And I know you won't be back
I know you're dying, baby
And I know you know it, too
I know you're dying
And I know you know it, too
Everytime I see you
I just don't know what to do

Siempre pensé que me llevarías a algún lugar habitado por una inmensa araña, del tamaño de un hombre, y que allí pasaríamos toda la vida, mirándola, aterrorizados.

And I will stroll the merry way
And jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear
Clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats
And they'll get high
On a bluer ocean
Against tomorrow's sky
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
'Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why'
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I even felt the pain.
We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again.

Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I will raise my hand up
Into the night time sky
And count the stars
That's shining in your eye
Just to dig it all an' not to wonder
That's just fine
And I'll be satisfied
Not to read in between the lines
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
And I will never, ever, ever, ever
Grow so old again.
Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
Sugar-baby with your champagne eyes
And your saint-like smile....

We feel so empty and our late twenties should be better times.
It’s the love and the truth and the hope and the faith,
That will destroy us in the end.
It’s the look in the eyes of those one night stands that gives us the will to pretend.
It’s the feeling of fucking the people that we’re loving that spurs us onto endless sleepless nights,
And love will destroy us in the end.
There’s not a thing that I can save from all those wasted, wasted days,
And theres no faith that will ever save me from being faithful,
And the damn phone never rings,
And I would give up everything,
For a little wine, some conversation
And just for being healthy.

Not every day of your life, you’re gonna wake up, and the clouds are gonna part, and the rays from heaven are gonna come down, and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes you just get in there and just force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out of it…Force yourself into it. Force yourself. Book only 4 or 5 days in the studio and force yourself to record an album in that time. Deadlines and things make you creative, but opportunity and telling yourself ‘oh, you’ve got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, you’ve got all the colors in the palette you want, anything you want!’ I mean, that just kills creativity.

¿Quién, si yo clamara, entre las cohortes de los ángeles
Me oiría?

Y aún cuando uno de ellos, de pronto, me estrechara contra su corazón,
¿no me desvanecería bajo su existencia poderosa?
Porque lo bello no es nada
más que el comienzo de lo terrible,

que apenas conseguimos soportar,

y lo admiramos tanto porque, serenamente, desdeña destruirnos.

Todo ángel es terrible. Así pues, me contengo
Y ahogo el clamor de mi oscuro sollozo.

Yo era un hombre bueno, si hay alguien bueno en este lugar
pagué todas mis deudas, pagué mi oportunidad de amar
sin embargo estoy tirado y nadie se acuerda de mí,
paso a través de la gente como el fantasma de Canterville.

Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger.

I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they’re like little flowers. I’ve always said that if you have a name for something, like ‘cut’ or ‘bruise,’ people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don’t know what it is, it can be very beautiful.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

frankly, i was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep and keep himself clothed. so i stayed in bed and drank. when you drank the world was still out there but for the moment it didnt have you by the throat

nothing will be fine
put your hand in mine
don't make an echo of my love
i don't wanna live that long

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

I remember reading
in my room, just reading,
and shutting the book,
looking up, and missing you, missing you,
and reading the paper again. There’s no freedom in it
or in fear: my heart’s not mine.

What's in my pocket?
You never knew
You didn't know me well
So well as I knew you

And I know
And you know too
That a love like ours
Is terrible news

But that won't stop me crying
No, that won't stop me
Crying over you

I'm not a prophet
Old love is in me
New love just seeps right in
And it makes me guilty

No amount of skepticism and criticism has yet enabled me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless, but it is obviously we who lack the sense and ingenuity to read the enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche.

Algunas noches sientes que al día siguiente todo puede ser perfecto. Todas las mañanas te despiertas sabiendo que el mundo debería haberse acabado mientras dormías.

Había algo en su forma de mirarme que no podía comprender, y el no entender de qué iban sus miradas me tenía delirando. Suponiendo universos. Es probable que todo haya ocurrido en mi cabeza. Todo ocurre en mi interior. Afuera no existe, afuera puede desaparecer en cualquier momento. No es seguro apostar por la realidad. La realidad es pura, es cierto, pero somos retazos. Existimos, ocupamos lugar, pero dónde, cuándo, cómo… por qué.

La vida es una serie de despedidas, inútiles intentos, mentiras piadosas y versiones de la verdad. Estoy dentro de la casa, la gente pasea alrededor, me habla de vez en cuando, desiste al chocar contra la muralla de mi desinterés, de mi absoluto estupor, conversan entre ellos, se ríen, derraman alcohol –alcohol proveniente de la misma botella del que está en mi vaso- en la alfombra –alfombra sobre la que mis zapatillas reposan- y bailan la misma música que yo puedo oír, incluso me sé la letra de algunas de las canciones que gritan los invitados. Yo también estoy invitada, pero no me siento bienvenida. Quizás sea mi cabeza, esta cabeza que suele jugarme sucio. Se sabe algunos trucos que aún no logro dominar. Hay unos perros dando vueltas. Todo lo que ocurre le ocurre al resto, no estoy dispuesta a salir herida otra vez. Cada vez. No tengo miedo, actúo con sensatez. Estoy dentro de la casa, pero estoy fuera de la vida.

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

But then anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground…I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

Screw poetry, it’s you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin

It would be so much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there’s no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth.

Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

And if I ever treated you mean
It was only because
I couldn’t have you for my own

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

if I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside

on my fingertips
and at brain edges

and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.

Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as an ordinary woman, to enter ordinary relationships - I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.

Men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights?

Jack Kerouac - from a letter to Allen Ginsberg, September, 1948

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I’m a Xerox of my former self. I can’t abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind and through me. I see casualness and mundane effects of gesture made by constant populations. I look familiar but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves. I am a stranger and I am moving. I am moving on two legs soon to be on all fours. I am no longer animal vegetable or mineral. I am no longer made of circuits or disks. I am no longer coded and deciphered. I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there. Maybe it’s only in here, inside my head. But my head is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run out and nobody’s words can touch me. No gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped into all this from another world and I can’t speak your language any longer. See the signs I try to make with my hands and fingers. See the vague movements of my lips among the sheets. I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization. I’m a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice. I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving to you here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, Consume me.

Reporter: Tell me how you feel about losing your house?
95 year old man: Why cry over something that doesnt cry over you?

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it… And one day she— or he— would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man that tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Candy, Candy, Candy  

I can't let you go  

All my life you're haunting me  

I loved you so

Candy, Candy, Candy  

I can't let you go  

Life is crazy 

Candy baby 

Yeah, well it hurted me real bad when you left  

I'm glad you got out 

But I miss you 

I've had a hole in my heart 
For so long 

I've learned to fake it and just smile along

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

What else? I also believe that if someone comes up behind you on the freeway and flashes their lights to get you to move into the slow lane, they deserve whatever punishment you dole out to them. I promptly slow down and drive at the same speed as the car beside me so that I can punish Speed Racer for his impertinence.

Actually, it’s not the impertinence I’m punishing him for, it’s that he let other people know what he wanted.

Speed Racer, my friend, never ever let people know what you want. Because if you do, you might as well send them engraved invitations saying, “Hi, this is what I want you to prevent me from ever having.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust.

The question in each and ever thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

I want so badly to believe that "there is truth, that love is real"
And I want life in every word to the extent that it's absurd

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces… And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me

A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.

As for that thorn he feels in his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and happy to be so, he builds up piece by piece - lucidity, refusal, make-believe - a category of the man possessed.

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over. I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers, the arrows of longing for the other shore.

I would like to be the air
That inhabits you for a moment
Only. I would like to be that unnoticed
And that necessary.

Tomorrow Never Knows

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying

Lay down all thought, surrender to the void,
Is it shining? Is it shining?

That you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being

Love is all and love is everyone
Is it knowing? Is it knowing?

That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing

But listen to the colour of your dreams
Is it not living, is it not living

Or play the game “Existence” to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning

To exist one need only let oneself be,
but to live,
one must be someone,
to be someone,
one must have a bone,
not be afraid to show the bone,
and to lose the meat in the process.

What makes it serious
is that we know
that after the order
of this world
there is another.
What is it like?
We do not know.
The number and order of possible suppositions in
this realm
is precisely
infinity!
And what is infinity?
That is precisely what we do not know!
It is a word
that we use
to indicate
the opening
of our consciousness
toward possibility
beyond measure,
tireless and beyond measure.
And precisely what is consciousness?
That is precisely what we do not know.
It is nothingness.