Chris Abraham > Chris Abraham's Quotes

“Academician Amosov’s ‘1000 Moves’ Morning ‘Recharge’ Complex 1. Squat –100 repetitions 2. Side bends –100 repetitions 3. Pushups on the floor –50 repetitions 4. Forward bends –100 repetitions 5. Straight arm lateral raises overhead –100 repetitions 6. Torso turns –50 repetitions 7. Roman chair situps –100 repetitions 8. One legged jumps in place –100 repetitions per leg 9. Bringing the elbows back –100 repetitions 10. ‘The birch tree’ –hold for the count of 100 11. Leg and hip raises. Lie on your back and bring your feet behind your head while keeping your legs reasonably straight. –100 repetitions 12. Sucking in the stomach –50 repetitions”
― Pavel Tsatsouline, Super Joints: Russian Longevity Secrets for Pain-Free Movement,: Russian Longevity Secrets for Pain-Free Movement, Maximum Mobility & Flexible Strength

“As sweet as it feels, I can't lie here forever curled up in a big ball of fuck-the-world.”
― Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead

“Imagine all of L.A. filled with windup men wandering empty-headed and waiting for orders and directions and purpose. That’s L.A. in a nutshell. A city of driven creatures, but no one is a hundred percent sure what they’re driven toward. Wealth. Fame. Power. Love. Revenge. These are all the obvious end points for the citizens of a spectral city, but none of them quite encompass a final goal. That’s more fragile. Something that slips away like smoke the moment it’s in your hands. It’s a moonshine cocktail of desperation and desire, the certainty that you can find perfection through sheer willpower and the cold terror that if you do reach the goal it will have twisted into something new. A new fevered need born of the search for this one. Searching for the next goal will breed another. And on and on. L.A. and Kill City full of Pinocchios with whirring gears for brains, all wanting to be real boys but sunk in the certainty that they’ll never become anything because they’re nothing. They came from nothing and are headed for a further and harder nothing.”
― Richard Kadrey, Kill City Blues

“Writing, someone said, is turning blood into ink.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The trouble with this country,” the late John Berryman once told fellow poet James Dickey, “is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“There were a lot of people in the service,” says Dickey, “who cried when they were discharged because they knew they would have to go back to driving taxicabs and working in insurance offices.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Courage, then, has nothing to do with a single act of bravery. Courage is how one lives, not one specific incident. Just as mortal sin is a lifestyle, not one startling transgression. Some,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“When I was young, I was afflicted with what my aunt called “convenient deafness.” I still am. I have the ability to tune out what is going on around me. It is normal for me to retreat inside myself and become less and less aware of my surroundings. If I am in a group and not talking, do not suppose I am listening. I am “away.” I am off in another world. Off in my natural habitat, my mind. Being”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Buying food never did make sense to me. When I finally spend some money I prefer to have some permanent evidence of the expenditure. Doing it on something that is immediately consumed leaves me feeling cheated. For much the same reason, I suppose, I have never smoked. Buying something and then setting it on fire is incomprehensible. So”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else’s life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Tomorrow can be the first day of the rest of your life. All you have to do is to follow Thoreau. Inhabit your body with delight, with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshments. And”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“I myself am my only obstacle to perfection,” wrote Kierkegaard.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The athlete doesn’t stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Credo quia absurdum,”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“I am an intellectual. This does not mean I am intelligent, but that ideas are more important to me than people.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“difficulté d’être.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy.”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The first half hour of my run is for my body. The last half hour, for my soul. In the beginning the road is a miracle of solitude and escape. In the end it is a miracle of discovery and joy. Throughout, it brings an understanding of what Blake meant when he said, “Energy is eternal delight.” I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometimes suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free. It”
― George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience

“my nihilism was the only thing that had saved me from myself.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“watching their smoke lured out the window by the sun.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“The word “escape” had blown out the glow: it was so boring of these American women to imagine they were worth pursuing.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“People go through life eating lamb chops and breaking their mother’s hearts.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn’t publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage