Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.
If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.
While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.
we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.
So you are Catholic? Didn’t know that.I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don’t worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.
One person’s garbage is another person’s commodity.
Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out–what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all.
He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?
I’ve been a Nick Cave fan since the early ’80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I’ve always followed his work and loved it.
I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I’m confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.