Duma Key

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.

Art should be a place of hope.

because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.

That's clear about the end of my other life, how I kept saying 'I can do this' even when I knew I couldn't, even when I knew I was fucked, I was dead ass fucked in the pouring rain.

Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations. And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

If you want to play, you gotta pay.

The truth is in the details.

In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.

The only religions I don't like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

Make-up covers a multitude of sins.

I just didn't want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.

In the end, we wear out our worries.

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.

Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

Clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

You got style, you got class, you got the lips to kiss my ass.

Do the day and let the day do you.

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

Are you still forgetting things?" "I don't know, I can't remember," I said.