“I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.”

“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”

“morning night and noonthe traffic moves throughand the murder and treacheryof friends and loversand all the peoplemove through you.pain is the joy of knowingthe unkindest truththat arrives without warning.life is being alonedeath is being alone.even the fools weepmorning night and noon.”

“Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.”

“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”

“I could understand the moon leaning across a bar on skid rowand asking for a drink, but I couldn't understand anything about myself,I was murdered, I was shit, I was a tentful of dogs,I was poppies mowed down by machine-gun fireI was a hotshot wasp in a webI was less and less and still reaching forsomething, and I thought of her corny remarka night or so ago:You have wounded eyes.”

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”