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161 " There are drafts of manuscripts spread over the floor where they slipped off the edge of the bed in the night. There is the unfinished canvas tacked to the wall and the scent of the eucalyptus failing to mask the sickening smell of used turpentine and linseed oil. There are telltale drips of cadmium red staining the bathroom sink — along the edge of the baseboard — or splotches on the wall where the brush got away. One step into the living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live, I am thinking. "
― Patti Smith , M Train
162 " How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn't a lack of a book but a lack of obsession. "
163 " I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. "
164 " For a time we considered buying an abandoned lighthouse or a shrimp trawler. But when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another. "
165 " There are two types of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Withering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. And then there is a type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. "
166 " I thought about it so much I could almost enter it: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum. "
167 " handicapping heaven, searching for patterns, and a portal of probability opening up onto the meaning of life "
168 " As we headed back to Tangier we saw a shepherd guiding a camel with her calf. Rolling down the window, I called out: —What is the little one’s name? —His name is Jimi Hendrix. —Hooray, I wake from yesterday! —Inshallah! he called out. "
169 " He began testing me immediately by issuing a string of obscene and racially repellent references that morphed into paranoiac conspiracy rants. - Look, you're wasting your time, I said. I can be just as repellent as you, only about different subjects. "
170 " that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality "
171 " I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions. "
172 " Trials of a person I didn't know lost in a labyrinth of aisles formed by the immense filing cabinets of Brazil - the movie, not the country. "
