When you stop growing you start dying.
William S. Burroughs, Junky.
“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replac...”
“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You dont wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict....”
“I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave ...”
“A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live hu...”
“Perhaps all pleasure in only relief”
“A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no...”
“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to...”
“[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)”
“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. ...”
“We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don...”
“Never let hard lessons harden your heart; the hard lessons of life are meant to make you better, not bitter.”
“Growing up means learning what life is. When you're little, you have a set of ideals, standards, criteria, plans, outlooks, and you think that you have to sit around and wait for them to happen to ...”