Diary of a Drug Fiend

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.

People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come.

We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.

What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.

Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.

Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.

The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!

The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.

This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.

Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine

I do not think we were afraid of death; life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed.

Of course," agreed Basil, "if you read it carelessly, and act on it rashly, with the blind faith of a fanatic; it might very well lead to trouble. But nature is full of devices for eliminating anything that cannot master its environment. The words 'to worship me' are all-important. The only excuse for using a drug of any sort, whether it's quinine or Epsom-salt, is to assist nature to overcome some obstacle to her proper functions. The danger of the so-called habit-forming drugs is that they fool you into trying to dodge the toil essential to spiritual and intellectual development. But they are not simply man-traps. There is nothing in nature which cannot be used for our benefit, and it is up to us to use it wisely. Now, in the work you have been doing in the last week, heroin might have helped you to concentrate your mind, and cocaine to overcome the effects of fatigue. And the reason you did not use them was that a burnt child dreads fire. We had the same trouble with teaching Hermes and Dionysus to swim. They found themselves in danger of being drowned and thought the best way was to avoid going near the water. But that didn't help them to use their natural faculties to the best advantage, so I made them confront the sea again and again, until they decided that the best way to avoid drowning was to learn how to deal with oceans in every detail. It sounds pretty obvious when you put it like that, yet while every one agrees with me about the swimming, I am howled down on all sides when I apply the same principles to the use of drugs.

Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.

The increase of knowledge has forced the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole. We are playing a game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan.

I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ''Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.

She it is, she, that found me In the morphia honeymoon; With silk and steel she bound me In her poisonous milk she drowned me, Even now her arms surround me

Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.

It is a sort of sinister warning that there is some person or some thing in the Universe outside oneself: and the realisation of that is as frankly frightening as the other realisation, that one is eternally alone, is horrible.

And allow me again to assure you that when you've got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won't find you have any time to get bored.

The Universe is the looking-glass of the soul.

Do you remember what it says in The Book of the Law? 'I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.'" "Yes," I said slowly, "and I thought it a bit daring; might tempt people to be foolhardy, don't you think?" "Of course," agreed Basil, "if you read it carelessly.

If I were a dog,' he said to me once, 'I should bark. If I were an owl, I should hoot. There's nothing in either which is good or bad in itself. The only question is, what is the natural gesture?' He thinks it his mission in the world to establish this Law of Thelema." She saw my puzzled look. " 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,'" she quoted merrily. "You must have heard those words before!

I saw at once the way to appeal to him.. 'Well, of course you know.' I said, 'in really smart circles one has to offer heroin and cocaine to people. It's only a passing fashion, of course, but while it's on, one's really out of it if one doesn't do the right thing.

For the first time in my life I was being absolutely myself, freed from all inhibitions of body, intellect and training...I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane and answering "Of course I am-sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.

I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease -that of thinking.

When we've all finished talking, there's something that never utters a word, but goes right down through the earth, plumb to the centre.