Steve Erickson > Quotes

“a dream is only a memory of the future”
― Steve Erickson

“I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.”
― Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight

“When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.”
― Steve Erickson, ARC D'x

“By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.”
― Steve Erickson, American Nomad: Restless Politics in a Secret Country

“It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.”
― Steve Erickson

“1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?”
― Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach

“This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free.
Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.”
― Steve Erickson, ARC D'x