Nick Flynn QUOTES

1 " The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.'

The outcome of the current crisis is already determined. "

― Nick Flynn , The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

2 " (2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost. "

― Nick Flynn , The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

3 " By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information. "

― Nick Flynn

4 " OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth. "

― Nick Flynn , The Reenactments

5 " My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience. "

― Nick Flynn , The Reenactments

6 " Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

7 " I’ve come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened. "

― Nick Flynn , The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

8 " Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

9 " I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,” she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

10 " You do know, right,
that between the no-

longer & the still-
to-come

you are being continually
tattooed, inked

with the skulls of
everyone

you’ve ever loved—the you
& the you

& the you & the you—you don’t
sit in a chair, thumb

through a binder, pick a
design, it simply

happens each time you
bring your fingers to your face

to inhale him back into you . . .
tiny skulls, some of us are

covered. You, love, could

simply tattoo an open
door, light

pouring in from somewhere
outside, you

could make your body a door
so it appears you

(let her fill you) are made
of light. "

― Nick Flynn

11 " What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into. "

― Nick Flynn , The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

12 " I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die. "

― Nick Flynn , Some Ether

13 " But what of Ham? It didn’t matter if he told anyone about his drunken father or not, if he chided him or tried to dress him, if he lifted his struggling body back into bed, if he took his hand and told him where to place his feet, none of this changed the fact of what he’d seen. It’s possible he opened a door innocently, followed the sound of Noah’s voice cursing God and the sky, possible he didn’t even look, that he turned away before seeing. And it’s likely that Noah hadn’t noticed the door opening, couldn’t have told you who had come in, which son, wouldn’t remember anyway. Apparently it’s God’s call. Ham saw his father drunken and naked, and for this he was cursed, and all of his offspring, and the races that led from these offspring, accursed forever. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

14 " When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turner’s Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesn’t want to be caught short. My brother remembers her at Christmas one year, an especially weepy time for her, when she put her hands around his neck and murmured, My little angel, you wouldn’t be so hard to kill. And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

15 " It’s the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame. "

― Nick Flynn , The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

16 " Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float? "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

17 " There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

18 " Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

19 " Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

20 " In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

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