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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City QUOTES

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

12 " By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

13 " What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

14 " The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

15 " We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

16 " I’m fast becoming the one who leaves things behind, "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

17 " Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. - Nick Flynn "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

18 " I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

19 " If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven. . . . This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is an apartment, a man is in the box. . . . Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city, my father mutters. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

20 " Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print. "

― Nick Flynn , Another Bullshit Night in Suck City