Quotes from book

Women

“I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?'
'Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.”

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.”

“I think I need a drink.'
'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.”

“Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”

“I was in love again. I was in trouble”

“Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”

“And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.”

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

“Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.”

“Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness….”

“Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any.”

“I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.”

“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”

“Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.”

“She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.”

“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)”