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1 " He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls... "
― Nelson Algren , The Man with the Golden Arm
2 " Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent. "
3 " There's people in hell who want ice water. "
4 " If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself. "
5 " For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all. "
6 " I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation. "
7 " Heroin got the drive awright-but there’s not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle. "
8 " Any time you want me, Captain, just phone by Antek, he’ll come ’n tell me I got to come down ’n get arrested. I like gettin’ locked up now ’n then, it’s how a guy stays out of trouble. I’ll grab a cab if you’re in a real big hurry to pinch me sometime—I don’t like bein’ late when I got a chance of doin’ thirty days for somethin’ I never done. "
9 " Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers' night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night. "
10 " F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. "