Jim Carroll Quotes & Sayings

On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one's body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty. — Jim Carroll

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination. — Jim Carroll

Little kids shoot marbles
where the branches break the sun
into graceful shafts of light ...
I just want to be pure. — Jim Carroll

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum. — Jim Carroll

My voice has a quiver/ A quiver is where you keep arrows until you shoot them. — Jim Carroll

I wind up stretched across the couch
still nodding with Sherlock Holmes
examining our crushed veins — Jim Carroll

You're growing up. And rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the Earth. And it's good that there is rain. It clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions, and it clears the streets of the silent armies ... so we can dance. — Jim Carroll

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb. — Jim Carroll

I was a Catholic boy, redeemed through pain, not through joy, — Jim Carroll

All right buddah gets a backstage pass but all his friends have to pay — Jim Carroll

I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

— Jim Carroll

If you are a parent, if you are an educator, there are very many good and powerful reasons to take children onto the Internet, but you have to be involved with them-you cannot expect government authorities or industry authorities or other people to do your job for you, and that is to help guard your children against some of these things that are occurring out there. — Jim Carroll

It was a dream, not a nightmare, a beautiful dream I could never imagine in a thousand nods. There was a girl next to me who wasn't beautiful until she smiled and I felt that smile come at me in heat waves following, soaking through my body and out my finger tips in shafts of color and I knew somewhere in the world, somewhere, that there was love for me. — Jim Carroll

You see, you just don't know
I'm here to give you my heart
And you want some fashion show — Jim Carroll

Poverty of young men alone behind the
stairways, who practice
alchemy inside bottle caps, who know
the altruism of a last syringe. — Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. — Jim Carroll

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows
... to open halfway each morning
... to close halfway each night. — Jim Carroll

Our team is good at getting dressed real quick, because we're the type of team that wears their uniforms all day. — Jim Carroll

they're fucking up minds they do not own. — Jim Carroll

There are times when the vehicle is in the ready mode, there are no indications externally that the vehicle can move and yet if someone accidentally hits the pedal, say when someone's inside, the car will move. — Jim Carroll

To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do. — Jim Carroll

Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty. — Jim Carroll

Back then, Billy imagined that drops of rain were unanswered prayers falling back to earth. — Jim Carroll

Violence is so terribly fast ... the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous ... the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible. — Jim Carroll

I sleep on a tar roof
scream my songs
into lazy floods of stars ...
a white powder paddles through blood and heart
and the returns
pure and easy ...
This city is on my side. — Jim Carroll

Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose - to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it. — Jim Carroll