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ed17eb4
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Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else --..
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life
torture
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Nick Flynn |
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c334ff2
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Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
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Nick Flynn |
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0b3eb89
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There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.
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Nick Flynn |
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749eb62
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excerpt] The usual I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A taste. I say top shelf. Straight up. A shot. A sip. A nip. I say another round. I say brace yourself. Lift a few. Hoist a few. Work the elbow. Bottoms up. Belly up. Set 'em up. What'll it be. Name your poison. I say same again. I say all around. I say my good man. I say my drinking buddy. I say git that in ya. Then a quick one. Then a nightcap. Then throw one back. Then knock one down. ..
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Nick Flynn |
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b9c932d
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Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.
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Nick Flynn |
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d35fa07
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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.
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Nick Flynn |
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624ed17
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In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.
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Nick Flynn |
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bb5a40e
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Some mornings you wake up fully in your body, and you know this is all there is--the air, the shape your body makes in the air, your hand, the skin that covers your hand, the air that covers your skin, the light that fills the air, a few colors in the light, this one thought, this dream dissolving--it is a dream that, in your half-awake state, embarrasses you. You don't tell it to the woman waking up beside you, the woman you love, because ..
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Nick Flynn |
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c94a9f3
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Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way--then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering.
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Nick Flynn |
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86fde22
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I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.
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wonder
death
smoking
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Nick Flynn |
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8bab698
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By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.
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Nick Flynn |
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8b63e45
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What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.
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Nick Flynn |
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1a0180a
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The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land ..
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Nick Flynn |
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be6bef5
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Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE..
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fathers
family
homelessness
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Nick Flynn |
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c87ea28
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We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.
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Nick Flynn |
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37a7316
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I'm fast becoming the one who leaves things behind,
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Nick Flynn |
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5b5f39d
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inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside.
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Nick Flynn |
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579e334
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If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word , as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word , a light coming on in an empty room. The telephone fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating a sunday, dusky. If it had been , we could have cradled her as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth, said good-bye. But it was , how overnight we could be orphaned
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dying
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Nick Flynn |
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c03c05b
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2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, ..
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writing
bridges
wandering
cities
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Nick Flynn |
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93f42de
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Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. - Nick Flynn
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Nick Flynn |
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d639324
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I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No.
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Nick Flynn |
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5c8bed9
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If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven. . . . This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is an apartment, a man is in the box. . . . Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city, my father mutters.
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urban
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Nick Flynn |
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13b127b
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Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don't ever rush into print.
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Nick Flynn |
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82d51d0
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Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.
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ethereal
boston
description
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Nick Flynn |
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6243b69
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What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.
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identity
transforming
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Nick Flynn |
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238f6eb
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Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.
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Nick Flynn |
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9937a50
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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.
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Nick Flynn |
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53f212e
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I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.
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Nick Flynn |
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b0fb568
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Not a formidable presence, except in that madman way that drunks wield, that does-it-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-anything?
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Nick Flynn |
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7ee6962
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My father's on my radar, but most of the time I shut it off.
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Nick Flynn |
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7f1c87b
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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.
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loneliness
sinking-ship
homeless
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Nick Flynn |
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fd091f0
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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.
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Nick Flynn |
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c9ff935
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His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time.
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Nick Flynn |
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63adbdb
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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....
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Nick Flynn |
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b602ef0
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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.
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Nick Flynn |
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8717c12
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You know the way Jesus rips open his shirt to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
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Nick Flynn |
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e2875cf
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The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativenes..
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faith
certainty
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Nick Flynn |
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06db350
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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.
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Nick Flynn |
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d823f0c
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And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily.
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Nick Flynn |
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c5304e4
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Emptying Town" I want to erase your footprints from my walls. Each pillow is thick with your reasons. Omens fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman in a party hat, clinging to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!" and I close my eyes. I can't watch as this town slowly empties, leaving me strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes on a line, the white handkerchief stuck in my throat. You kno..
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Nick Flynn |
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3a35b81
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He claims not to be drinking, but I don't think he knows what this means.
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Nick Flynn |
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ab8ba1f
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My statement to Harris that his book contains is specious hyperbole. In , Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.
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religion
intolerance
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Nick Flynn |
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7114044
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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.
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truth
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Nick Flynn |
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5c07100
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note: The phrase 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
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Nick Flynn |