Jim Carroll

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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

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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.

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Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

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

Read quote

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

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

Read quote

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.

Read quote

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

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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.

Read quote

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.

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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... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

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I was this Catholic kid, and I never really lost that. I loved the rituals of Catholicism. The mass is a magic ritual; it's a transubstantiation, and the stations of the cross - I mean, a crown of thorns? Getting whipped? It's punk rock.

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I was always the young guy. And when you're successful when you're young, it leads to an arrested adolescence or something, y'know.

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Quotes by Jim Carroll