Hollywood Park Quotes

“How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one? How long until the walls become clouds and the floor opens up like clear blue sky and there’s nowhere to go but your stone tower where you are the one who chooses who to haunt and how to haunt and when to haunt. You learn how to act, to pretend, to inhabit different forms in your mind, different faces to the world, some of them terrifying, some charming, some cunning, some innocent, some a hundred feet tall, godlike, and invincible, others tiny and frail, beseeching and ironic. Five, ten, ten thousand different ghosts of your creation, one for every person you meet, one for every occasion, so many that they crowd the hallways of your castle in the sky.

But somewhere within those imaginary walls, sitting alone in the dark above the clouds, you are aware that you are none of those things. Only sad.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“That’s the whole magic trick of an essence brought to life by a song, to become an artist when you feel broken and you’ve decided to turn it into beauty. To make the pain useful. The longing, the fear, the heartache and dread, the ability to see these broken pieces of yourself like cracks in an armor through which you are better able to see the world: too broken to be normal, just broken enough to see beauty.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Children experience loneliness like shame. They imagine the reason they are alone is that there is something wrong with them, that they have done something bad, something that makes them too gross to touch.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“But when these moments end and the buzz is gone and the reality sets in that I know I am lost and that this facsimile, however splendid or romantic, cannot erase the basic feeling that I am alone and it is because I am damaged and it will always be that way, the whole thing seems less like a romantic story and more like an intoxication from which I awake to see the consequences, like those kids on LSD in the 1960s who died thinking they could fly.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Take your pain and make it useful. That’s what it means to be an artist. I never want to go home anyway.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Some people are likable simply because they give off the constant impression that they like you, and something about this trait is calming and easy to trust.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Life isn't working out? Okay. Pack the car with as many books as you can carry, bring a guitar and an old keyboard, fill your empty pages with lyrics and stories. Read the books, the ones you always wondered about. Swallow your pride and because you can't do anything else, hold a job or maintain a relationship with another human being, move to a tiny trailer at the edge of the world and just get on with it. Write.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Children with attachment disorders grow up to have difficulty in relationships, which they seek out of need and then destroy out of fear, resulting in a lack of self-worth and a sense of isolation.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Why be normal? Destroy yourself and dance in the embers. Embrace the catharsis. Use it.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“I feel like an amoeba in the presence of gazelles.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Our personal space is violated by such parents who do not recognize our need or desire for space, because they see us only as extensions of themselves.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“You’re gonna have to accept that your trauma caused him trauma. It’s hard for kids to deal with emotional abuse. You crossed all boundaries. You neglected his needs. You made him your caretaker. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s abuse.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“I feel like a blank space covered in skin. There is no place for this walking blank thing among the warm beings, the ones with something inside, the people who can have a drink and laugh at a joke and look into their features and see something other than the wretchedness I see in mine, the day that immeasurably thin skin falls away and I simply disappear. Into the ocean. My ocean. The one that will swallow me whole if I let it.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“We talk about schizophrenics and depressives, alcoholics and autistics, but narcissistic personality disorder and the closely related borderline personality disorder—these mental illnesses that create relationships without empathy, without love, filled with delusion and manipulation—they are slippery and ghostlike. They take years to unravel, partly because the person who suffers from them simply doesn’t know he has it.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“The attachment disorder made us unable to trust close relationships because the first thing we ever learned is that people leave you. Then it also made us panic at the prospect of being alone. It’s slow, difficult, excruciating work.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Children of narcissists learn their feelings don’t matter to the narcissistic parent. The child carries an ever-present sense that he must bury his own ideas about the world, his own self, and do the thing required of him to please the narcissist, to receive the impossible-to-reach love and approval he craves. In short he doesn’t really know himself because he spends his life seeking to fulfill the fantasy world of the narcissistic parent.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“When you peel away all the layers of masculinity--the cleverness, power, sarcasm, the strength we built (or faked), the toughness (which is really just quiet suffering), white knuckles, bodies covered in boots and beards, muscles, green ink skulls, arrows, and ghosts, hearts surrounded as if by barbed wire--what you see is a sad boy in the dark afraid that he will always be alone because that is the first thing he ever learned about life.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“If I could open up my chest at that moment, there would be nothing but a blank shield inside, a barrier, rigid and sealed, from which nothing escapes, into which nothing is absorbed. It starts at the bottom of my throat and runs all the way to my knees. I hide behind it. I hold it up over me. I feel it there when I swallow, when I breathe. There are no tears because tears come from the heart and the heart is beneath the shield. There's no anger either or sadness, just a feeling that I have to figure out the right thing to say.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“There’s no container for the thing he was now that he’s gone. It’s an irrational number. Infinity divided by zero. That’s probably why we put people in containers when they die: coffins, urns, mausoleums—to give a physical shape to the absence”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“To make the pain useful. The longing, the fear, the heartache and dread. The ability to see these broken pieces of yourself like cracks in your armor through which you are better able to see the world: too broken to be normal, just broken enough to see beauty.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Children of neglect. Orphans. Inappropriate demands. Physical boundaries. There is the sense that something is off, something indelible. that I missed it. I missed something essential, something everyone else can see.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“We simply are left with the feeling that we are not allowed to say no, because we were taught that the narcissist’s needs are more important than our own.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“It’s a mask, this face you create for others, one you hide behind as you laugh at jokes you don’t understand and skip uncomfortable details, entire years of your life, as if they simply didn’t happen.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“There is only this frozen ground, this river of black water, this empty well, this blankness, these ghosts, nothing to do but forget about shelter and become the storm.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“It was confusing to live between these two extremes: fearing closeness, then obsessively needing the comfort it provided, to be forever like a Ping-Pong ball going back and forth between the two.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“My mind winding down a pathway thinking only that I had screwed it all up, the chance at love, the chance for something real, that I didn't deserve any of it, that I sang all these songs about love but it was all bullshit because what did I know? What could I know, when right at the center of my heart there was only an empty pit, that I had never cared enough about myself to put anything else there instead?

I remembered there was a decision at the center of it, one made long ago in a a tiny trailer at the edge of the world, reeling and confused and angry and hopeless, to just reject these things: love and closeness and faith in another, in favor of a different life. To give up and try to make the pain useful.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park