authors-from-the-united-states

"He was a horse of goodly countenance, rather expressive of vigilance than fire; though an unnatural appearance of fierceness was thrown into it by the loss of his ears, which had been cropped pretty close to his head."

"In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of —— two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the very best men in the county; which, in the Georgia vocabulary, means they could flog any other two men in the county."

"It is said that a hundred gamecocks will live in perfect harmony together it you do not put a hen with them; and so it would have been with Billy and Bob, had there been no women in the world. But there were women in the world, and from them each of our heroes had taken to himself a wife. The good ladies were no strangers to the prowess of their husbands. and, strange as it may seem, they presumed a little upon it."

"All the knowing ones were consulted as to the issue, and they all agreed, to a man, in one of two opinions: either that Bob would flog Billy, or Billy would flog Bob."

"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it."

"I think style chooses you... if I could choose, I would write like Jane Austen and I would draw like Rembrandt."

"Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable."

"I used to maintain that if it couldn't be put into words it didn't exist; if anything I believe rather the opposite now."

"One scarcely knows to whom to complain."

"Of course I believe in graphology, also palmistry, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, and all those other delicious things you can find in places like thesaurusi (can that be the plural? No, it can't, it must be thesauri), which turn out to mean prognostication by means of snail tracks or something."

"If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either."

"Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I'm gay. But I don't really identify with it much... I've never said I was gay, and I've never said I wasn't... What I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else."

"There's a point when you wake up from a drunk, in perfect clarity. The synapses in your brain feel greased, and the distinction between your subconscious and conscious mind evaporates. A point where everything is hyper-vivid, your intelligence humming at maximum capacity, like a meditating Buddhist acolyte overwhelmed with sudden white-light attainment. And at that instant, you see everything charged with energy - the past, present and future spread out in front of you, blissful and meaningless and simultaneous, every microscopic detail in every object drifting through your eyes, along with panoplies of stars and universes, pulled together through the woven fabric of your flesh, so that while disintegrating, you're invisible, while seeing everything, you see nothing."

"The young man was a strip of struggling flesh carried along by the crowd, surfing the heaving waves in a boiling pilgrimage of genetically enraptured insects. The insect mob emptied suddenly into the mouth of a department store and he was left swaying on the corner in the stabbing sun, attacked by the screaming reflections of passing cars and plate glass windows. He pinched his eyes up at the dry hills. They arched above the city like the gnarled backs of drugged lions, stretching up into a heaven that was itself descending in thick sheets of sulfuric mist. The sunlight filtered through this levitating powder and felt more pernicious for it, as if the sun’s rays were transformed by chemical reaction into malevolent xrays, nutriment-seeking carcinogens that penetrated the open pores of unprotected skin and would eat any living thing from the inside-out."

"The older boy lay curled on his side, baking in the sun like a discarded and emaciated fetus left for dead in the rocks by its wandering, mutant giant mother, as she’d scavenged among the washed up trash of the ruined city. His eyes rolled sightlessly in his head as sand flies worked at the gummed saliva in the corners of his lips. His fingers were bunched in against his chest and twitched as if typing out a frenetic description of his dementia."

"In order to come out the winner, in my mind, I memorized their faces, down to the smallest detail, the smallest nuance of expression — the black curling hair growing out of his cheek that he'd missed shaving, the pale pink blemish above her right eyebrow showing through the film of cream-colored makeup, applied with skillful thickness so that it blended out smoothly into her forehead. When I closed the door, I held them in my mind, exposing their image permanently onto a blank sheet in a secret file where I kept my memories for future use. I'd use this and other memories of them to serve me, to make them please me. They were flimsy in there, among the images I preserved, foolish really, not threatening at all. Two people who crushed each other's bodies every othernight beneath their mutual flab, muttering gratuitous, lustful phrases into each other's waxy ears until they'd come. Then they'd roll over, farting a sleep-inducing lullaby."

"Everything merges eventually — everything is organic. It’s impossible to distinguish one thing from another thing. When your mind is emptied of selfishness, it crumbles and dissolves in the water. If I cut at my body and concentrate correctly, I won't feel it. Eachtime my heart beats, it jerks violently and whips my spine loose, tugging at the base of my brain. Memories move through the clotted and rotting forest inside my head and crush the present beneath them. My memories don’t belong to me. They’re as unknowable as a centipede fluttering its legs in the dark corner beneath the sink. When an image moves through my nervous system, it’s with the predatory greed of an intruder. My body’s laid open, transparent, defenseless. Each second of time is an individual insect feeding on my blood."

"Willie Nelson has an ability that is particular to country music – these one-liners that set up a whole song, then everything else is built around that. I guess you could call them zingers. Crazy is the perfect song. It's an incredibly complex emotion: it's concise, but it describes a state of mind so clearly and poignantly. He's a true American poet."

"My hands are soft and cool. When I touch the smooth enamel walls of my stall, I feel the warmth of the women pass through the wall and into me. I absorb everything around me. I can taste the bitter luminous gas trapped in the fluorescent tube above my head. I can decipher the single note hum of the light beneath the depth-charge rhythm of the disco. The beat of the music pummels my body and spreads me outwards against the walls of the stall. I'm no longer contained in myself. I'm joined to the walls, part of a living cell. The stall is an organism. The circle of stalls is a circle of malignant cells surrounding a cancer. The women are rotting, sucking each other and transferring their corrosive juices back and forth, sharing their disease. I can smell them, ammoniac and fetid, through the wall."

"Resting like a child in the arms of these twisted vines, where the ropes of hair mixed with the fringe of her jacket, her breasts rose naked like a sacrifice offered up to the light, like two huge peeled eggs, plump and melting in the weak warmth of the sun, threaded with a faint map of blue veins. She turned to me and smiled. Her mouth was a wreck of browned and blackened claws, but her tongue was pale pink beneath them, gleaming like the last surviving innocent animal in a universe of scum. Steam rose from her insides, drifting up into the trees."

"Initially, advertising slogans influenced me the most. I really liked the way that language was aggressive and immediate, but with lots of subtext. It's reaching for the back of your mind to influence you."

"Dylan is like a friend I've returned to throughout my life. Jim Morrison, too. Of course, he's pretty corny on the page, but it works with the music. I used to listen to the Doors over and over, in various mental states."

"I’m laughing my guts out as we fuck. You’re trying to flatter me, telling me how wonderful I am (only because you’ re raping me), and I’m dreaming of stabbing you through the ear with my knife. I’m devoted to the idea of your belittlement. It’s what I live for, what I think about every second. While I’m at work, where I’m treated like a dog, only my body is present. My mind is standing on top of a monolith, looking down on a swelling crowd of cowardly men. It’s my position in life (I’ve always known it) to cut the throats of arrogant men, and weak, humble men also (maybe they deserve oblivion even more). I’m breathing a red fog. It goes down into my lungs and fills me with my real strength: my lust. It’s my secret consciousness, my right to kill, as well as my duty. I love to hold your hand, feeling its buried strength, caressing it into impotence. You feel it too. You feel your power draining into me. You're helpless. There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m a magnet that draws every particle of life out of your body. All you live for is orgasm, for the last drop of life to be sucked out. I’ll never understand how you can be so stupid as to strive for your own denigration. But it isn’t my place to understand you."

"When I sleep, my dreams mingle with scenes generated from the screen, like sewage discharged into the black sea inside my room. Last night, for instance, in order to revenge the perceived indifference of my lover — a self-composed, confident, and buxom lawyer, as seen on a weekly “gritty and realistic” cop show — I stalked her as she walked a path through the chaparral in the hills of Topanga Canyon dressed in high heels and a power suit, searching for a used condom as evidence in a divorce case turned violent, her architecturally massive hair flowing in the dry baked breeze like the flag of an elite nation of gods."

"Fanged branches clutched at my face and hair, the mud sucked and chewed at my feet, and I fell rather than walked as she led me through the forest. The trees ran with sap, hunched over like emerald-haired mammoths dripping with weight. I drank the air, saturated with bitter dew and the gas rising from the mulch. My clothes bled from my body, drenched with clammy sweat and steam. My shoes were stolen and devoured by the mud. My shirt disintegrated, dripping from my back. My feet were shredded by sharpened sticks and bones concealed in the muck. My nostrils and mouth harbored feeding hives of gnats and mosquitoes. Twisting walls of poison vines rose up like cyclones funneling down from the dense mesh of the forest canopy."

"High up in the wall of the abandoned building, the mute dwarf sat perched on his tall stool like a buzzard and peered down squint-eyed out the black empty window. Waves of collapsed roof and concrete swept out over the lot beneath him, as if his building had crashed down from the sky and sent a rolling swell of destruction outward on impact. Scattered crusts of snow flashed up at him, signaling like mirrors in the debris, causing flecks of color and transparent spiders to drift across his eyes as his pupils shrank against the light. Behind him in the darkness, his bed was a mountain of crusted blankets and frayed quilts he’d extracted from the trash heaps of the neighborhood and piled in a damp mound in the furthest corner of the room. The bedding was still warm from his night’s burrowing and steamed in the cold, surrounded by a flickering horseshoe of melted candles that trapped it like a dim beast in a magic circle."

"A shadow figure on the wall is cutting off the head of a little boy. The huge and looming murderer is holding up the head like a Viking showing off a war trophy. He’s swinging the head above him by the hair. Shadow-blood flies through the air in a black swirl. A handful of the boy’s brains land in my face like warm cottage cheese. There’s a fisheye close-up of a terrified eye in the TV screen. An oiled young stud does situps on his Soloflex machine, eviscerates himself with an impossibly honed and gleaming kitchen knife, flings his dangling intestines over his shoulder like a sashaying transvestite in a mink stole and walks straight into a day school room full of naked shit-smeared children, who devour him in a bloody tornado of razor-sharp teeth. They’re led away yapping and screeching like a pack of dogs on a multiple leash by their teacher, who wears a neon yellow leotard, purple high-heeled shoes, and has the slicked hard flesh of someone who obviously works out six hours a day herself..."

"Responding quickly, multiple hands press into the arena from the surrounding walls. Disembodied feelers, they form the interior nerves of an underwater creature groping for nourishment and stimulus. The fingers gesture, twitch and writhe, trying to attract the attention of the dancers. From the inside, the women see flickering mirrors reflecting the colored lights, and beneath the mirrors they see gummy prehensile pods, swaying frantically in the quickened current."

"The fear of being captured by the killers - hung up on hooks forced through the skin at the base of our necks, burned slowly alive above a low fire, our flesh pulled away in slabs from our bodies then eaten before our eyes - moves our legs forward, keeps our eyes half-open. Inevitably we'll drift into the jungle where we'll be eaten by the beast. He'll drag us to his secret pit and play with us until he's bored, then devour us. The thought of its tusks buried in our guts is less terrifying than the knives and fire of the human killers, so we fall into the brush, defeated, waiting to be taken. As we fall into sleep, we hear him breathing at our necks, hot and moist, prodding our bodies with his snout. He talks to us in a human voice, like the innocent voice of a little girl, soothing us, reassuring us, laughing softly to himself beneath his words."

"My bed sits in the center of the room, a steaming sarcophagus in a dim pagan tomb. The television is on a platform at my feet, washing my swaddled and bloated living corpse with ethereal blue light. Looking to the left, the wall is covered with the desiccated shell-bodies of cockroaches. Each time I catch one (and there are thousands, millions living in the walls, under the floor, in the ceiling — I hear them shifting like the waves in the sea in my sleep), I dry it slowly at low temperature in the oven, then I pin it to the wall. The wall glistens in the flickering light with the sheen of their armor. I’ve pinned them in spiraling primitive shapes that map out the cosmos, landscapes, stars, jagged lightning bolts, skulls, knives, fat hermaphroditic fertility symbols. The designs are difficult to discern, due to the fact that everything is the same brown-on-brown color scheme, but they’re there, if you look closely. I watch the wall for hours each day, like a mandala. The dancing shadows of the television give the detailed beadwork of the wall a sense of grandiosity. I pretend I’m in a cave beneath a jungle burial ground examining, awestruck, an ancient African mural I’ve discovered, cool and perfectly preserved beneath the malarial humidity."

"Since I've pretty much abandoned the idea of sound manipulation as a way of making music, and am just concentrating on trying to write good songs on acoustic guitar, the first thing that has to be there is a song that has a power or reality on its own, completely naked, just the guitar and voice. It has to be good enough to be performed live like that to be convincing in itself."

"We're unified, from stall to stall, man to woman, hand to body, liquid to solid, animate to inanimate. It doesn't matter if it's my hands inside her or someone else's as she rolls and glides from feeler to feeler. We're one creature, pulsing with bliss, sight, sound. Our orgasm never ends."

"Hidden by distance, the darkness behind the stars reached an impenetrable black density. Light, thought, and possibility were sucked helplessly into the inhaling mouth of the dead hole. Inside the hole was the center of the heart of the opposite of space. The future and the past were nullified, backwards and forwards. History rewound, snubbed out before it began. Silence was exterminated. The earth floated in a sea of black blood, glowing like an ember cupped in the hands of an invisible god. His corrupt breath spread clouds of poison gas, cloaking the continents in a sweet tasting atmosphere. Agitated hoards of reptilian predator birds migrated through the hemispheres in a stone-eyed search for prey, casting shadows on the red dirt like cryptic signals flashed down from the veiled deities that lived behind the sky. Beneath the ground, liquid fire rolled in waves of buried hatred. A mindless howl echoed through the lightless subterranean canyons in a single sustained note of ignorant and savage pain."

"I’ve got muscles, sol want to use them. I get up in the morning, pose naked in front of the mirror, and flex for half an hour. Looking at myself, I want to beat someone’s head in with my bare fist. I want to see my fist forced down some asshole’s face, reach down, grab a handful of intestines, and pull them up and out the throat. That would make me feel good. Whatever makes me feel good is what counts. The reason I build my muscles is to use them. That makes me feel good. It'd be senseless to work out for years just for the stupid satisfaction of feeling “healthy” or knowing I look good when I’m about to fuck somebody up the ass. I get satisfaction out of grinding a face in the pavement. I don’t want to question it. I like causing pain. That’s how Iam. I see an immediate response to something I just did. No bullshit. Pure animal pain, me the victor, me in control, me on top, you on the bottom."

"I learned to walk the tightrope between threat and survival, to smile when I wanted to scream, to fight when I longed to be held."

"I do not write for permission. I do not exist for approval. I am the dream and the dreamer."

"Unbecoming isn’t weakness; it’s the beginning of finding the truth beneath the layers."

"I am the ghost that refuses to be buried, the hymn that rises through clenched teeth."

"A false sense of security is the only kind there is."

"Love is a locked door, and I’ve never been the type to beg for keys."

"She was the storm I couldn’t sail through. The door I couldn’t kick open. The silence that swallowed my name whole."

"I’m not asking for a reply... All I want now is to love you quietly. Without interruption. Without guilt."

"They made me a weapon, then feared the sharpness of my edges."

"In many tribal cultures, it was said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture. If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth."

"The mirror was his enemy, its truth sharper than any insult."

"Does grace have a breaking point?"

"If You are the answer, why am I drowning in questions?"

"I’m not asking for the full revelation, just a glimpse to know I’m not lost."

"You can master the game and still lose the house."

"You don’t have to love me back. I already forgave you for the leaving you haven’t done yet."