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West Is San Francisco QUOTES

West Is San Francisco QUOTES

1 " I fought the truth of my continued state of sobriety daily. Deep inside, a black storm thrashed, lashing the underside of my heart, making me bleed steadily. I still felt like I couldn’t walk by a certain kind of bar without the energy of that bar grasping its wormy phantom skeleton fingers after me, catching my long hair or pricking my cheek and leaving scratches. I couldn’t pass by without the smell of it pressing on my chest, suffocating me even as it drew me in. That’s what being sober felt like. Something like not enough oxygen. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco

2 " A long time ago she could have nourished herself on her own inner light, but she chose to become what she was now instead, and she exacted her revenge against her wasted destiny by drinking in the light of every artist she found with any sensitivity at all toward the intangible world behind our everyday reality, until she grew giant and swollen, like a sun which demanded that around it every planet must revolve, while the creative people she fed off grew dimmer, until they were like a dying fire, stars winking out until nothing was left but impenetrable darkness.
And how would I tell Artie I knew all this? That I had poked around in her head and the heads of anyone who came near her for the past eight months and I just felt it?
Yeah, right. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco

3 " When you’re a full-time serious drunk, empties become a longstanding problem. They pile up fast, right under your nose, and you can’t believe one person could use that much of anything. Empties aren’t just garbage, they’re evidence. Evidence of how much you use and so therefore evidence of what you are. Like corpses heaping up in exponential proportion, they force you into the business of digging mass graves. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco

4 " Most people don’t realize how often PI’s deal with escaped quarry. You think running after a rabbit in an unfamiliar forest is confusing? Try hunting a human being in the middle of San Francisco. Tailing someone on the freeway isn’t so bad, but when gobs of crowds and cars are set up every 10 feet, almost as if the entire world plays along against the PI, chasing after one little person can be like fighting a one-man war. That’s why any good PI is an underdog at heart. He’s used to getting what he needs from a world determined not to give it to him. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco

5 " I’m Scarlet,” she said. The smile never left her lips for a second. “Scarlet Monroe.”
She was absolutely gorgeous. With her long blonde mane of hair, almost pure-white porcelain skin, those ruby red lips and the queenly arched eyebrows, it was impossible not to notice how beautiful she was. But her being beautiful didn’t strike me right off the bat. It wasn’t the first thing I noticed about her. What that first thing was, it’s impossible for me to say. Any skull has a human face, but that’s not the first thing anyone notices about a skeleton—that it was human once, and so still is. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco

6 " It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, even harder than quitting drinking, showing up week after week, pushing so much out of my core, onto the pages in front of me. But it was the best thing I’d ever done, too. I wrote things down that I’d never told another living soul, and when I’d written enough I didn’t want to drink so much anymore. The book I was writing was one of the ugliest I’d ever seen, but also the most beautiful, because it was the only good thing I’d ever done in my life. It was the only proof I had that I could stand and fight. "

― Lauren Sapala , West Is San Francisco