Quotes from Nick Flynn

You know the way Jesus rips open his shirt to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny, the way he points to it. I'm afraid the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.

Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.

My father's on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off.

Aside from these infrequent outbursts he possesses the gentle demeanor that sometimes trails the newly sober, that deep acceptance that comes with realizing how badly you'd fucked up your life.

we fill the nothing with suns, line them up, swallow sap, swallow field, drop by drop, each stem a pump. Rose to rose to rose to rose to rose to rose to rose, calyx & anther, all summer gone.

I'm riding beside my best friend, and I tell him, in the same offhand tone my mother had used, That's my grandfather's funeral, and he looks at me as if I'm insane.

His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time.

Not a formidable presence, except in that madman way that drunks wield, that does-it-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-anything?

When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn't want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch….

Everything he did, as long as you stayed in the village, whether shouting obscenities at passing children or sleeping in the cemetery, all would be remembered when they looked at you, they would say to themselves or to whomever they were with, It's his father, you know, the crazy one, the drunk, and they couldn't help but wonder what part of his madness had passed on to you, which part you had escaped.

And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily.

He claims not to be drinking, but I don't think he knows what this means.

My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith , Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

note: The phrase Son of God had many meanings in Jesus' time, one of which was a son born without a father, which, by all accounts, Jesus was. Just as the phrase virgin birth could mean simply an unmarried woman giving birth, which, by all accounts, describes Jesus' mother (see Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus ).

It's the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.

I've come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.

My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.

Here's the me breathing into the you & here's the you breathing into the me & here's the trembling & here's the chalice & the only way out is to make sin holy.

I was unable to throw myself in the ocean," she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.

IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

Bag of Mice I dreamt your suicide note was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag, & in the bag were six baby mice. The bag opened into darkness, smoldering from the top down. The mice, huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag across a shorn field. I stood over it & as the burning reached each carbon letter of what you'd written your voice released into the night like a song, & the mice grew wilder.