Home > Author > Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll QUOTES

Jim Carroll QUOTES

1 " It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

2 " Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. "

― Jim Carroll

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

"

― Jim Carroll , Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

4 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

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

― Jim Carroll , Void of Course

6 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Petting Zoo

7 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll

8 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll

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

― Jim Carroll , The Petting Zoo

10 " they're fucking up minds they do not own. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

11 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

12 " Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible. "

― Jim Carroll , Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

13 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Petting Zoo

14 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

15 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

16 " Now I got these diaries that have the greatest hero a writer needs, this crazy fucking New York. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

17 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

18 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

19 " 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. "

― Jim Carroll , The Basketball Diaries

20 " Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose—to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it. "

― Jim Carroll , The Petting Zoo