Quotes from Junky

“When you stop growing you start dying.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
- pg. 41”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“A junkie spends half his life waiting.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“I was lying there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about this uremic poisoning. A woman I'd known slightly in Texas had died of it after drinking a bottle of beer ever hour, night and day, for two weeks.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic insanity, random events in a dying universe.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“A John is different from a sucker. When you're with a sucker you're on alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken but a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you're with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself too.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“I don’t spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: ‘Junk here!”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“After Bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. It was a gruesome sight. I remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. Bill declined, saying "I don't think you would be very well satisfied." Bill twitched his fleshless hips. "You should see me in the nude," he said. "I'm really cute.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Cuando uno deja de crecer empieza a morir.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“You're both mother fuckers." She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Perhaps all pleasure in only relief”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago, when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves. A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me the magic of childhood. It never fails, I thought, just like a shot; I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“His face with lined with suffering in which his eyes did not participate.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Your plan was unworkable then and useless now... Like da Vinci's flying machine plans...”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming or raising frogs.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

“Todos creemos al principio que podremos controlarlo. Luego dejamos de querer controlarlo”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky

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Popular quotes

“Welcome to Sanctuary, my home and the focus of the Imperials, whom I serve and direct. This is an island of force in Free Alaska, of the planet Earth, and the system of mankind.

We are those who wage eternal war against tyranny. We are those who choose death over submission. Freedom over oppression. And honor always.

Choose our values, and you will have found a friend. Choose to control a free spirit and we will control you. Decide for others and we will decide for you.

Use force against the vulnerable and our force will render you helpless. Practice coercion and we will oppress you.

Bring strife to mankind and we will bring you war!

Now is the time for your misgivings and complaints. Now is the time for you to voice your concerns and your apprehensions. Stand now and speak in freedom. Speak your mind and you will be heard. If you be injured, say now by whom. If you seek redress and your cause be just, I will stand with you. If a wrong can be righted, I will undertake that task. If it is I that have offended, show me my error and I will correct it.

This is also the time for blood, if blood is what you seek. Here you can fight, if only combat will give you satisfaction. Here you can win in trial by ordeal, but here too you can lose. If your cause be as important as life itself to you, it is here you can wager your life. Fairness is intended, but beware that here lies the intent to prevail.|

Your cause, if true, would be better served by reason, for with reason the Imperials can be moved. Force is the resort of passion, but passion may serve evil or good. Here it serves us and we will stand by its consequences even if it takes us all from the Earth.

It is said where you find those who live by the sword you will find those who die by the sword. Look no further. You have found those who make such a choice for their life.

You have found the Imperials. I am their Voice.

Speak for yourself now if you will.”
― William C. Samples, quote from Fe Fi FOE Comes

“Rejoice in the hope. Endure under tribulation. Persevere in prayer. -Romans 12:12”
― quote from New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

“Perhaps the Queen's prayers, and those of Bernard, had been efficacious, or perhaps Louise had been more attentive in bed, for during 1145--the exact date is not recorded--she bore a daughter, who was named Marie in honour of the Virgin. If the infant was not the male heir to France so desired by the King--the Salic law forbade the succession of females to the throne--her arrival encouraged the royal parents to hope for a son in the future.

Relationships between aristocratic parents and children were rarely close. Queens and noblewomen did not nurse their own babies, but handed them over at birth into the care of wet nurses, leaving themselves free to become pregnant again.”
― Alison Weir, quote from Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life

“Sweet,” he whispered, and stole a kiss from her lips. “Sweet… let me stay with you a little longer.”

-Jack to Amanda”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Suddenly You

“The man was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there”
― Patricia A. McKillip, quote from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

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