Henry Rollins · 352 pages
Rating: (888 votes)
“You don't make me feel like you used to.
That's why I'm leaving
That's why people leave each other
They come to their senses and get selfish again.”
“I will do my best to dodge tonight's depression
Hide in sleep
Damage myself in dreams
Wake up older, slightly more used.”
“Don't push me
I've got a corner at my back
I've nowhere to go except over you.”
“I'm so burned out, the only person I can stand is myself.
I'm the only one I would put through this.
Wheels and wings,
The ride is everything.
I'm all I've got.
I'm all I can take.
Another day has destroyed a part of me.
So far so good.”
“Always knowing you're going to die
And until then knowing you've got to live.”
“Life forgets me but will not let me forget
Holds me down and tells me that I'm free.”
“I have to keep moving
I don't want to think
I'm going to work all day today
I don't want to stop
Don't want to let my brain catch up my thoughts
How will I be able to tell them that I'm a shadow
A grey patch of cold rotting life”
“Don't let despair mutate your flesh
Look at my twisted stumps of thought
See the fingers, listen to the voice
I am slowly becoming the end of the line.”
“She is the gin. Cold, intoxicating. Gives you a rush, makes you warm inside, makes you lose your head. Take too much, it makes you sick and shuts you down.
He is the coffee, hot, steaming, filtered. You have to add stuff to it to make it taste good. Grinds your stomach, makes you jittery, wired, and tense. Bad trip, keeps you up, burns you out.
Coffee and gin don’t mix, never do, everybody keeps trying and trying to make it taste good.”
“I want to be that which overcomes itself Listening to them makes me weak and small I watch them go out and fuck each other They tell me that I’m crazy The years scar me I don’t want a smooth ride I want the crushing wheel”
“They’re all over me I smell their beer breath mixed with my sweat I can’t answer all the questions, I can barely think straight Now I’m alone in the room To be hard you must be alone To withstand this shit you must be hard The logic works itself out right in front you Be alone as much as you can If you want to hit like a ton of fire You have to get to the essential number One”
“Martha spouted off a long message to the gnome, including all the details of my injuries, precisely where I was, and who Martha was and her son Helmut. When she asked the gnome to repeat the message, he got it all mixed up, and so she did it again and made it longer, but he still got it all mixed up, and so they went back and forth, and finally Martha lost patience and threw him out the window. The gnome scurried away chanting, “Red for message! Red for message!”
“Sometimes we're cruellest to the ones we care about the most.”
“It was as if a strand connected that day with this one and the Maker's pleasure was coursing through it like blood in a vein.”
“Yeah?’ Kit asks tersely. He glances over Todd’s shoul-der at me. ‘Do you love him?’ he asks me, nodding his head at Todd. The directness of the question stuns me. My mouth falls open. What the . . . ? ‘Do you love him?’ he demands again. ‘Kit, it’s none of your business,’ I stammer, feeling the weight of Todd’s gaze on me. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘It’s none of my business. I have no right to ask you − I get that − but you need to speak to me. If you send me away, I’m just going to keep coming back until you do.”
“In a way, when TV went digital, we lost a foothold in reality. Now, we'll never truly know if what we're watching is real or has been altered and transmitted to us. Digital culture brought a step away from truth.”
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