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Black Coffee Blues

by henry-rollins · 1992

very light edge wear to cover

25 quotes ★ 3.85 (3,357) Literature

Quotes from the Book

You have to get away from them. You have to get as far away as you can otherwise they'll kill you with their lives. They don't know what they do. They are careless with themselves and they take too much for granted. They make their shortcomings your problem. The only way to keep your head above it and heal your wounds is to crawl away.
147
How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.
88
I want someone who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don't already know and make me laugh. I don't care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.
49
When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretension
48
It's funny how people think that they have "a right to life". Now isn't that the biggest load you ever heard? You don't have a right to shit your pants on Sunday. Let's take it back to the jungle. Where the fuck are your rights there? No layers in the jungle. Civilization has allowed the weak to survive. You can sit back and be an overweight, apathetic piece of shit, smoke your dope and still survive because you have a right to life.
30
Look, it's a monster. He's walking alone. Look, he's pulling something out of his pocket. He threw it on the ground. Let's go see what it is. It's a black box. You open it... ok... Look, it's sorrow, misery and pain. It's loneliness and longing. Boy, he'll be sorry he lost these.
21
I'm not close to people, I am close to myself. I spend a lot of time inside.
19
What goes best with a cup of coffee? Another cup.
18
She liked me because she said that we both hated everything and knew that friendship was an act of desperation. She said that for a man I was alright. She said that people were half-way and if it was up to her a lot of people would get killed and a lot of men would be walking around without their balls. She said that they should go on sale for women to hang off their rearview mirrors.
17
I hope I don't dream tonight. Sometimes you can get so far in yourself that you don't know who you are.
15
I live in my head. It’s the only place I can go where everybody knows me.
8
I wear my sunglasses. Keeps you on one side and me on the other.
5
You try to find a special person Someone you can be with Someone you can touch Someone you can talk to Someone you won’t feel so strange around You found that they don’t really exist
3
The guy who shot him had quite a temper. Homicide had always made sense to him. He would say that there wasn’t a problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by shooting someone in the face. You just had to find the right person. Hell, you didn’t even need to do that. Sometimes just shooting the person next to him was enough.
3
I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There’s not a lot that isn’t dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines through the Christ machines. Through the eyes of the throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love’s howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spider’s jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the lines in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes.
3
I want to walk in the desert tonight. I want the wind to pass over me. I want to let the poison bleed through the soles of my feet into the desert floor. I want to starve the monster. I want to punish it with thoughts of clean night wind. The
2
There’s a great feeling when you’re totally resolved. When you make the jump from being lonely to being only. When you’re so totally alone and absolute.
2
Don’t let them scar you with their weakness. They will cripple you with their lives. They will make you want to die just to get away from them.
2
One morning, he woke up and all he could think of was that he had been destroyed by his parents and it was too late to change. They had taken him like a con man takes a drunk sailor. He had believed too much. It was the grind that finally got to him.
2
Now shut the fuck up and watch some MTV.
2
Sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re not an idiot.
1
He shuffled into middle-age silently and without protest.
1
Once you have been on the outside, a part of you will always be out there.
Life is death in slow motion.
All his life he believed everything his father told him. Now he’s in his mid-thirties and he’s his own man. He hates his father’s guts but no longer fears him. He never said NO to the fucker even he was humiliating him in front of his friends. Now he works extra hard to raise his self-respect. It has taken him years to find out who he is. Years spent trying to wash the father blood from his body. He’s earned his life.

About henry-rollins

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About the book

very light edge wear to cover

Book details

First published
1992
Goodreads rating
3.85 (3k ratings)

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