Quotes from Luke Davies

Not only good to be alive, but nice to come with a stranger. Intimacy? For now I want nothing of it. I am simply trying to emerge from the violent unnecessariness of death.

I understand only that a vast void, an emptiness, is needing to be filled. O the things we grasp at.

When you talk about love, and family, invariably too you are talking about compassion. This would include the notion that we are all just lumped together, and tolerance is a virtue.

What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the streeet, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse.

I would feel deeply the elegant satisfaction of being caressed by that gawky boy, and I would take his face in both my hands and kiss him hard, as if I could draw from those lips the very strength and sweetness he did not know he had.

We are all, I realise, even as I write this, merely moving closer to our deaths. At the end of this sentence I am closer to mine than I was at the beginning. It's relentless. It's a savage thing. And yet for a long time I've carried with me a sense of life opening out. Evidently it's some kind of protective illusion.

It is so exquisitely funny and sad, the way we view each other; how very little, despite our best efforts, we communicate.

Always, everywhere, the world is filled with collisions.

In the act itself there is a point at which a light that comes from nowhere starts flickering like a strobe. What happens is not exactly a hallucination. But it wells up from deep in the earth and pounds through my body and there is nowhere to escape from its intensity.

All summer it feels as if it will rain soon. All summer the strange feeling, 'something will break.

I try to tell myself I must accept certain private inevitabilities. I will live a life of continual deep fatigue, for example. I will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this condition will not improve, nonetheless I will learn to live with my rancor as if it were a minor irritation. There will be many achievable things that I will not do and then there will come a time when I realize they are no longer even achievable.

His eyes are huge and black. I think about desire. There are flickerings that occur, and we know very little about them. Millimetres of dilation are words in a language.

What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.

For every gain there is a sacrifice, and the removal of the parasite sometimes entails removal of the host.

We were the coolest people in McDonald's. We had a lot going for us. We'd found the secret glue that held all things together. We were young and beautiful. We were married now. We were about to go home, get out of our monkey suits, get naked, and get wasted.

If any signs were obvious, I think I must have buried them. Because when you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it.

In the end, life can be seen to be inconsequential, in the way that nothing matters on some vast evolutionary scale. But everything matters, and we know the most when life seems most horrific, when at each instant of time, all the space around us is everything there is.

But Murphy's Law in the world of heroin said that if things could get out of control, then of course they would.

Like all junkies, I guess I'd thought for a long time that my environment was the problem. My situation. The people I knew.

I had no particular purpose in mind, which was never a good way to do things.

For every hundred-dollar cock in Candy's cunt, Candy needs a two-hundred-dollar jab in the arm. And I'm Prince Pimp, welcome to the show. I would vomit up my life if I could.

She wanted a reaction. As usual, I felt nothing but the desire not to have a confrontation.

It never ceased to amaze me how much I could hate the world when I wasn't stoned. It seemed such a hostile place. And yet, get a good blast in me, and my love for humanity was abundant.

There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there were more good times. When I first met Candy: those were like the days of juice, when everything was bountiful. Only much later did it all start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar, the endless dark heat.