Blues for Cannibals Quotes

“Somehow the United States has become a nation with a permanent air of unreality and yet, by law, custom, or magic, has managed to severely restrict the choice of fantastic roles available to players in this unreality. Halloween is the last night left.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“The river is rising. All over the planet the floods come often and the structures we build to contain them prove more ineffectual. It does not matter what kind of dikes we build. We can throw up massive security forces and still the drugs move at will. We can build big steel walls and still the people cross and move and mock the walls. We can create quarantines and still the plagues migrate to new ground and flesh. The world we think we believe in is ending before our eyes and no amount of meetings or discussions will come up with enough sandbags to stop the flow. Our fathers and mothers placed their faith in the new high dams. We sense the rivers cannot really be tamed.”
― Amy Goodman, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“In the beginning was the light and light was with life and the light was life and the earth quickened, and we came out of the ground to yearn forever and never reach the light but to tumble through generations, our skins afire with this lust for the light and we go toward the light or we go toward nothing and we become nothing. That is all.”
― Amy Goodman, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“The days of the week cease to have meaning, as do the weeks of the month and the months of the year. The only sure things lie in little facts, like holidays are bad because families will be together and thus have more opportunities to hurt each other. Orderly progress, like the neat list of classes found in one’s college records, is a fantasy. I learn things on the run and without intention. I am not working on a degree or a career. Knowledge comes like stab wounds, and pleasure comes like the surprise of a downpour from a blue sky in the desert.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“I am ready for the journey and it comes in steps and leaps with no sense of progress. I’ll tell you what happened but I can’t draw you a map. It wasn’t that kind of learning. Dante invented a topography of the inferno and there really is an inferno, but Dante knew in his bones his geography was simply a way to give form to a seething plasma. So we go to the inferno, we speak of cauldrons, imagine witches chanting, and yet we know these things do not exist, that they are efforts to make hard-edged shapes out of slippery matters. And we are left—in the dark hours of the night when we find it difficult to lie to ourselves—with the memory of the fire and fresh burns on our bodies.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“Love, I know, is essential if death is to be put in its place, and it has a place, but love is essential even if I do not know the words that give it flesh and scent. That is why we find it so difficult to write about sex. Not because we are so inhibited and prudish but because when we write about sex, we get acts and organs, a breast, a vagina, a cock, juices, tongues and thrusts—and wind up with recipes but no food. Orgasm is just a word. We have a hunger and love fills it, however briefly, and our accounts of having sex do not catch what drives us into the night seeking light.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“We fled to the country and that was good but never enough. Besides, we could not stay. Country living is behind us, we can only visit or remember that part. The war came also. We felt love, we fell into the cooking, we worked very hard in the garden where we created a lover that rubbed us raw and drowned us in perfume. These things are only part of why I am talking to you from this small room with a cable television and fifty-five identical channels. The rates are posted on the door, plus the essential directions for escape when the fire comes to char our bodies. In this room, I can finally remember that it started with a tree. Come, we will go into the wood.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground