When you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry
New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. I kept wishing I could go home and shoot the bull for a while with old Phoebe.
I held hands with her all the time, for instance. That doesn’t sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. […] We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
5 Famous Recluses:
1. J.D. Salinger, (1919 - 2010)
The great New York City-born writer, for decades lived a quiet, exceedingly private life, far from the literary limelight, in the small New Hampshire town of Cornish.
2. Greta Garbo, (1905 - 1990)
In the 1950s she bought an apartment in New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life, hardly venturing out, refusing all interviews.
3. Howard Hughes (1905 - 1976)
He had spent the last 20 years out of the public eye living as a recluse in hotel penthouses around the world.
4. Bettie Page, (1923 - 2008)
Page was the pin-up girl of the 1950s, as well as the most recognizable fetish model (boots, leather, whips, the works) of the era. Page became recluse in recent years, reappeared in public in December 2003.
5. Agnetha Faltskog (1959 - )
Singer with the Swedish superstar pop act, Abba, Agnetha Faltskog retreated from the public eye in the late 1980s, living for years on a remote island off the coast of Sweden.
(via mohandasgandhi)
Source: holdentumbrl
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
