Jim Carroll Quotes

I was a Catholic boy, redeemed through pain, not through joy,

It always puzzled Billy that so many of his most fond and formative memories took place in winter. The fact was that he never liked this season, except as a young child when falling white flakes were magical, and the sun on the snow-covered baseball fields in the park was the color of light through quartz.

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.

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

I think of poetry and how I see it as just a raw block of stone ready to be shaped, that way words are never a horrible limit to me, just tools to shape.

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

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

I'm just really a wise ass kid getting wiser and I'm going to get even somehow for your dumb hatreds and all them war baby dreams you left in my scarred bed with dreams of bombs falling above that cliff I'm hanging steady to.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

I sleep on a tar roof
scream my songs
into lazy floods of stars ...
a white powder paddles through blood and heart
and the returns
pure and easy ...
This city is on my side.

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.

If you are a parent, if you are an educator, there are very many good and powerful reasons to take children onto the Internet, but you have to be involved with them-you cannot expect government authorities or industry authorities or other people to do your job for you, and that is to help guard your children against some of these things that are occurring out there.

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

To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.

I wind up stretched across the couch
still nodding with Sherlock Holmes
examining our crushed veins

He was about to find out that when you open a door with a psychiatrist's name on it, you'd better be prepared to witness exactly how fucked up your life has become.

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.

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows
... to open halfway each morning
... to close halfway each night.

It was in Central Park near the lake and I watched a weeping willow turn into a giant rooster and fly off. No tree remained. It glided beautifully into the sky, a big blue barnyard. My mind went with it, something all you bald head generals and wheelchair senators could never imagine.

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.

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum.

they're fucking up minds they do not own.

I'm beginning to have second thoughts regarding the validity of Gloria's theory that I can overcome my heroin addiction by the simple process of shooting up vast quantities of speed with her twenty times daily.

Poverty of young men alone behind the
stairways, who practice
alchemy inside bottle caps, who know
the altruism of a last syringe.