«Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.»

«The streets lie, the sidewalks lie, everything lies You can try and read it but you're gonna get it wrong...all wrong The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter but you're gonna get it wrong And it's gonna sink its teeth into your flesh and pull you to the bottom.»

«I touch her hair. Her shoulders clench together and she stares at the ground. She looks like a stone bird. I am an iceberg. Everyday I float farther and farther out to sea. But that can't be. An iceberg feels no pain. An iceberg doesn't feel cold. I feel cold. I feel distant. There is no one. There is nothing. That's where I am. She won't look me in the eye anymore since I asked if I could kiss her. Even wanting turns her cold.»

«There's no such thing as an ex-junkie.»

«I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There?s not a lot that isn?t dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines throught the Christ machines. Through the eyes of throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love?s howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spiders?s jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the line in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes.»

«I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.»

«?The whitest white dipped in clinging dirt. Another summer has thrown its corpse on my floor. The streets have given birth to even more strangers. Rivers of urine stripe the sidewalks. It rained the other day and the only thing that occurred to me was it would wash the smell away for a few days. Tonight is the first hot night. Outside my window, the human noise factor is intense. It?s past midnight. They talk too much. They scream liquor-fueled idiot chatter. I pull away and close the door. I think about how it?s all going to play out. How much time people spend trying to get across to each other, trying to clear their names. Trying to overturn the charges brought against them. I have decided to tell them that it?s all true and not seek a fair trial. It?s the only way to be free. Stop trying to matter. I could get my body tattooed with air-colored ink and walk invisibly amongst them. I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better. I want to be able to like living people somehow. As it is now, they?re I best coming through speakers or trapped between book covers. Here I go into the heat. Four months as a human anvil.?»

«Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong, and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't come back. You're left so alone that you can't explain.»

«You can never change the scenery that surrounds you. You can run from the fists that pound you, but you cannot escape your feelings. I've crawled every sewer from here to there and I've never done it. And I burn silently.»

«The ones who don't do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down.»