Quotes from Steve Erickson

You keep looking around for who's in fucking charge, and there's just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell's angry on Fifth Avenue, that's what I want to know.

A glory that costs everything and means nothing.

The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are.

Qualunque sia il caso, lei è sparita dalla mia vita. È il prezzo che ho dovuto pagare per aver flirtato romanticamente con l'apocalisse. Sono stato così sciocco da credere di poter giocare con il caos, mentre era il caos a giocare con me.

Even as the fact of it becomes more overwhelming, more unbearable, some things are irrevocable, if not circumstantially then in the heart and memory, the heart and memory being the only two things that can puncture the flow of time through which hisses the history of the future.

Everything that's truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that's the most irrevocable thing of all.

Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.

Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths.

The obscure discovery of a reclusive mathematician in Cornwall forty years earlier who had found a missing number between nine and ten.

There it was . . . a missing day that lay between the thirty-first of December 1999, and the first of January 2000.

America had . . . become a country of nomads, who wandered the hallways of the American soul not sure if they were in a funhouse or a cancer ward.

One of those random acts of vandalism that metaphors commit now and then.

Springsteen . . . was completely relevant and utterly anomalous at once, by way of a passion on the one hand that matched the punk moment, and a romanticism on the other hand that defied the postmodern moment.

In the sexual shadowland of the Nineties, commentary converges with confession.

One letter written on the backs f postcards, all of them numbered and sent one by one.

L.A. . . . is the old America of legend and distant memory . . . the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day.

By nature, memory is more monogamous than desire.

I am the moment in which explodes the Twentieth Century's great menage à trois between chaos and faith and memory.

A dream's only a memory of the future, right?

I kept the poems in the tower with my hoarded documents of murders. I was constructing my own house of conscience with the transgressions of conscience on exhibit. I found myself poring over the verses for days and nights trying to break their code.

He closed her eyes and she slept. The people of the Crowd watched her, while somewhere else sailors read the memory of her face, the compass of mazes.

Identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it.

Walter Cronkite was the last newsman everyone trusted in the same way that the Beatles were the last music everyone loved and Marilyn was the last star everyone concurred was worthy of the word.

Ironically, if only because over the years I've known so many - from college deans to studio executives to European expats - who come to Los Angeles aspiring to nothing other than living in Topanga, I wound up there by accident.