“Kuwa na uraibu wa mafanikio, si wa dawa.”

“Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one’s sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.”

“Time wasn’t passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”

“I don’t get bad bitches; I make them.”

“Faith, thought Eszter . . . is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.”

“Opium resembles religion insofar as a magician resembles Jesus.”

“I wind up stretched across the couchstill nodding with Sherlock Holmesexamining our crushed veins”

“Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isn’t for you.”

“An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.”

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.”

“Ros was dead.He had loved heroin more than it loved him. I was shocked beyond imagining; he was the first of my friends to fall.”

“Poverty of young men alone behind thestairways, who practicealchemy inside bottle caps, who knowthe altruism of a last syringe.”

“The problems of today’s youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.”

“Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.”