“It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me.”
― Jim Carroll, quote from The Basketball Diaries
“Little kids shoot marbles
where the branches break the sun
into graceful shafts of light…
I just want to be pure.”
― Jim Carroll, quote from The Basketball Diaries
“they're fucking up minds they do not own.”
― Jim Carroll, quote from The Basketball Diaries
“To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.”
― Jim Carroll, quote from The Basketball Diaries
“It was in Central Park near the lake and I watched a weeping willow turn into a giant rooster and fly off. No tree remained. It glided beautifully into the sky, a big blue barnyard. My mind went with it, something all you bald head generals and wheelchair senators could never imagine.”
― Jim Carroll, quote from The Basketball Diaries
Jim Carroll
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date August 1, 1950
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“Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from Aztec
“I growled and then slapped him.
"Hey!" His hand pressed to his cheek.
"You always say that when I slap you," I said.
"I think it's a problem that you know what I say when you slap me," he said. "That's not the kind of intimacy I'm looking for.”
― Andrea Cremer, quote from Bloodrose
“When one has apparently made up one’s mind to spend the evening at home and has donned one’s house-jacket and sat down at the lamplit table after supper and do the particular job or play the particular game on completion of which one is in the habit of going to bed, when the weather out is so unpleasant as to make staying in the obvious choice, when one has been sitting quietly at the table for so long already that one’s leaving must inevitably provoke general astonishment, when the stairwell is in any case in darkness and the street door locked, and when in spite of all this one stands up, suddenly ill at ease, changes one’s coat, reappears immediately in street clothes, announces that one has to go out and after a brief farewell does so, feeling that one has left behind one a degree of irritation commensurate with the abruptness with which one slammed the apartment door, when one then finds oneself in the street possessed of limbs that respond to the quite unexpected freedom one has procured for them with out-of-the-ordinary agility, when in the wake of this one decision one feels capable, deep down, of taking any decision, when one realizes with a greater sense of significance than usual that one has, after all, more ability than one has need easily to effect and endure the most rapid change, and when in this frame of mind one walks the long city streets—then for that evening one has stepped completely outside one’s family, which veers into inessentiality, while one’s own person, rock solid, dark with definition, thighs thrusting rhythmically, assumes it true form.
The whole experience is enhanced when at that late hour one looks up a friend to see how he is.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Stories
“Which is a sad thing when you're only seventeen.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Exiled Queen
“Nora said, “I thought vampires drank virgin blood. They hypnotize…they turn into bats…” Setrakian said, “They are much romanticized. But the truth is more…how should I say?” “Perverse,” said Eph. “Disgusting,” said Nora.”
― Guillermo del Toro, quote from The Strain
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Skeleton CrewBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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