Permanent Midnight Quotes

“To me, God is like this happy bus driver.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere.

From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“...with enough rock in your system, you could hear every noise in the universe.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Can you understand this? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Dependably so. But the Daddy-rush... Forget about it! I've never felt anything so terrifying! It's so real, even the pleasure can break your heart. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is what separates shooting smack from loving your little girl. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart. Not like a child.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Sometimes I feel like a writer, sometimes I just feel like a snitch.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Nothing ever turns me on so much in a woman as unhappiness.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Why am I always attracting women who still slept with stuffed animals?”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Our eyes kissed...”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Mostly what I remember is the way things looked sometimes after I'd push down the plunger, sometimes when I got so high so fast I couldn't even take the needle out of my arm. I just sat back, head lolling on my shoulders like a balloon on a string, and everything, walls, carpet, couch cushion, my own hands, broke down to swirling molecules, reassembled as a million other things, and danced before my eyes before arranging themselves once more as reality. The endless cycle, that dance of molecules and their return to something solid, left me as drained as if I'd flown around the sun with veins for wings.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addition.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“I was too busy destroying my life to bother with a minor detail like contractual obligation. I had veins to blow. A child to ignore. Friends to rip off. An apartment I hated on sight to pay for and move into.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Not until I stopped doing drugs altogether did I feel like a man. Not until I walked out of that fire did I have any idea what the word even meant.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Society has always said: Make money. Artists have said: But there's something else. Cliché City. But in Hollwood there's the Big Lie that you can have both. A lie you want to believe.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“You might say that success ruined me. You might say I ruined success.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“I'm wearing a diaper. Right now.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Her skin felt smooth and firm. Her hair smelled faintly of motor oil. Her mouth tasted like coffee. She was absolutely real, and it was the sexiest combination on the planet.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight