45 Quotes by Jerry Stahl

More and more, I’d been having this feelings of zeroness. Of HERE-I-AM-AND-IT-JUST-DOESN’T-MATTER.

My own theory is that people are just so desperate for somebody they can feel better than, in America. Now that everyone’s going broke and working 17 jobs – if they have one at all – at least they can look at these guys behind bars and think, “At least I get to wear my own clothes to work.”

The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn’t tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.

Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn’t know you needed transforming.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.

I think it’s just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people’s private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It’s almost hard to write fiction anymore.

Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.

Still... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren’t impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That’s how much I loved her.