The Reading Room

“if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.”

“the writing of some men is like a vast bridge that carries you over the many things that claw and tear. The Wine of Forever”

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. people so tired mutilated either by love or no love. people just are not good to each other one on one. the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor. we are afraid. our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides. or the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant.”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.”

“in this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck”

“I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.”