The collection / 11 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

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

02Undated

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

Jim Carroll / quote

03Undated

I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

Jim Carroll / quote

04Undated

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.

Jim Carroll / quote

05Undated

all right buddah gets a backstage pass but all his friends have to pay

Jim Carroll / quote

06Undated

Poverty of young men alone behind thestairways, who practicealchemy inside bottle caps, who knowthe altruism of a last syringe.

Jim Carroll / quote

07Undated

I wind up stretched across the couchstill nodding with Sherlock Holmesexamining our crushed veins

Jim Carroll / quote

08Undated

On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one’s body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.

Jim Carroll / quote

09Undated

You're growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies... so we can dance.

Jim Carroll / quote

10Undated

Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.

Jim Carroll / quote

11Undated

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth.

Jim Carroll / quote