“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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“Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined
with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.”
― Alexander Theroux, quote from Darconville’s Cat
“And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You
“is what you fall into, and love can only grow from that,”
― River Savage, quote from Incandescent
“suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from All My Puny Sorrows
“A man who stands in front of a woman does nothing more than block her view. She needs a man standing next to her, so grow up.”
― Penelope Douglas, quote from Aflame
The Realm of You: A...
Sugar
Hell
Knight's Fork
An Affair Before Chr...BookQuoters 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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