Heroin Bob Quotes

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mounting up on my shelves.

At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing

To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs.

Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry.

When we read, we are spying on someone else’s imagination and inhabiting it; the authors and their characters are momentarily our friends, even if they betray us, or we them.

The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible. Some

For a girl who often felt like she lived more in the cozy world of books than in the unforgiving world of the playground, a book of books was the richest journal imaginable; it showed a version of myself I recognized and felt represented me. Over

Dark books say to us, “This isn’t about you. You are in fact alive and safe.” Yes, there’s an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside. If

I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. The

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

At the office I worked in before that, my boss required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here.

To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” Instead, Woolf urged, “open your mind as widely as possible … and it will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.

Children are notoriously literal readers, and I was no exception. Books, I believed, contained the entire truth about everything, and if you could just read every book or even a good chunk of the Truly Important Ones, you would know what you needed to know about real life. And you could be a part of it. Naturally, I got a lot of things wrong.

In college, books assigned for class were read as competitive sport - the more critically, the better.

Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before.

Books are how cautious kids get to experience a kind of secondhand rebellion, a safe way to go off the rails.

When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories.

When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read.

You should read this book’ almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself.

Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. ‘You have to read a book at the right time for you,’ Lessing also said, ‘and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.

There was a shiftiness to kids who secreted themselves in a corner to read God knows what instead of what they should have been doing. Reading when you were supposed to be raking the leaves, reading when you were supposed to be sleeping, reading when you were supposed to be making the bed, not lying in it. I did everything I could to read my way out of doing anything else. It was the one thing I was good at.

Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination. While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.' Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.

In early December 1971, he signed a rather flat defense of Bob Dylan, who had suffered months of harassment from a “fan” named A. J. Weberman: “A.J. claims everything Dylan writes is either about Weberman or about heroin. What bullshit,” the letter read. “It is time we defended and loved each other—and saved our anger for the true enemy, whose ignorance and greed destroys our planet.” The letter was signed: “The Rock Liberation Front, David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon.

Done right, [Vampirella]'s a perfect blend of goth and glamour, of horror and heroine, of sex and savagery. I've always strived to capture the essence of the old Enric covers, which treated the character with a certain respect, and depicted her in a very non exploitative way. I often look at the old Bob McGinnis "Carter Brown" book covers and wonder what she would look like painted by master of the female form such as he.

I mean it, it’s another gap in your education. Until you can learn to understand her, you’ll get nowhere as a detective. She’s everybody’s conscience, Bob—the universal maiden aunt, cousin or sister. Humanity’s backbone. Throughout history, she’s gone to the stake for you again and again; not with any sense of heroism, but as a matter of principle and because it would never occur to her to do anything else.

At the office I worked in before that, my required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here.

The film version of Chicago is a milestone in the still-being-written history of film musicals. It resurrected the genre, winning the Oscar for Best Picture, but its long-term impact remains unclear. Rob Marshall, who achieved such success as the co-director of the 1998 stage revival of Cabaret, began his career as a choreographer, and hence was well suited to direct as well as choreograph the dance-focused Chicago film. The screen version is indeed filled with dancing (in a style reminiscent of original choreographer Bob Fosse, with plenty of modern touches) and retains much of the music and the book of the stage version. But Marshall made several bold moves. First, he cast three movie stars – Catherine Zeta-Jones (former vaudeville star turned murderess Velma Kelly), Renée Zellweger (fame-hungry Roxie Hart), and Richard Gere (celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn) – rather than Broadway veterans. Of these, only Zeta-Jones had training as a singer and dancer. Zellweger’s character did not need to be an expert singer or dancer, she simply needed to want to be, and Zellweger’s own Hollywood persona of vulnerability and stardom blended in many critics’ minds with that of Roxie.8 Since the show is about celebrity, casting three Hollywood icons seemed appropriate, even if the show’s cynical tone and violent plotlines do not shed the best light on how stars achieve fame. Marshall’s boldest move, though, was in his conception of the film itself. Virtually every song in the film – with the exception of Amos’s ‘Mr Cellophane’ and a few on-stage numbers like Velma’s ‘All That Jazz’ – takes place inside Roxie’s mind. The heroine escapes from her grim reality by envisioning entire production numbers in her head. Some film critics and theatre scholars found this to be a cheap trick, a cop-out by a director afraid to let his characters burst into song during the course of their normal lives, but other critics – and movie-goers – embraced this technique as one that made the musical palatable for modern audiences not accustomed to musicals. Marshall also chose a rapid-cut editing style, filled with close-ups that never allow the viewer to see a group of dancers from a distance, nor often even an entire dancer’s body. Arms curve, legs extend, but only a few numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘Cell Block Tango’ are treated like fully staged group numbers that one can take in as a whole.

Having learned how to speak more from what I read than from what I heard, I excelled at mispronunciation. Mildred became “Mild Red,” like a soft shade of scarlet, which seemed rather pretty. I was always horrified to be corrected, and occasionally insisted my way was the right one even in the face of decisive evidence to the contrary. I did not, like many other readers I know, take to saying “mih-zled” in place of misled, but I nonetheless repeatedly embarrassed myself, feeling exposed as a fraud when someone pointed out that “vogue” was not, in fact, pronounced “voe-goo.” (Years later, the literary critic Liesl Schillinger would dub these “mumblenyms”—words mispronounced by heavy readers who’d encountered them only on the page.)

I felt ahead of the game, convinced that if only I read enough books, I would have everything I needed for the life I wanted, both aware and unaware of how little I really knew.

Spalding had been to a meditation retreat and had seen gyrating testicles on the wall when he tried to meditate; I had thought about trying to meditate but hadn’t because I was sure something would have distracted me, though probably not naked balls on the wall. Whatever happened, I’d tell him all about it.

There is always room for more books, even though I’ve barely dented the piles I already have. Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mountaining up on my shelves. Places to stack them are covered as soon as they surface; I keep adding new built-in bookshelves. At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I’ve deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. I own many times more books than are noted in my Book of Books, yet still I worry over his empty pages. I use a minuscule type when writing in my Book of Books in order to leave room for everything that needs to go there. Bob’s pages, I used to fear, would one day run out. Now I fear I will die before I can fill them up. This is every reader’s catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven’t read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible.

But the best children’s books also encourage young people to ask big questions about who they are and what their place is in the world. When you read children’s literature as an adult, you get to revisit the same sense of newness and discovery that you did as a child. You can delve into big emotions, without cynicism or jadedness. You let all that go.

The sense memory of those initial reading experiences resurge in a visceral way and, for an odd time-suspended moment, you can actually see what the pages looked like through your six-year-old eyes, a feeling Spalding Gray called “a complicated present”—one in which you are both in the present and in the past at the same time.

What happens when an estranged parent dies? How do you tie up the complex emotions in a foreshortened amount of time? A deathbed reconciliation—too late, compromised, of questionable sincerity—might feel cheap or, worse, thwarted. There would be guilt, and regrets.

It was the kind of house where you constantly bumped into a memory.

And a funny thing happened when I devoted myself to the authors I vehemently disagreed with: I found I enjoyed reading them. There’s a personal and intellectual challenge in being forced to inhabit another point of view, to reexamine your opinions and learn to make a case for them. As all debaters know, sometimes you figure out what you really think only when in opposition. If reading people who think along the same lines as you do is a comfort, reading the people with whom you disagree is discomfiting—in a good way. It’s invigorating. To actively grapple with your assumptions and defend your conclusions gives you a sense of purpose. You come to know where you stand. Even if that means standing apart.

Reading about other people feeling bad can make you feel a little bad and eventually come around to making you feel good, or at least better. Whatever they’re dealing with always seems legitimately far worse than what one is going through, or at least much more interesting. And it’s an easy way to avoid one’s own problems.

There is always room for more books, even though I’ve barely dented the piles I already have.

And the stories that bind readers to one another. Reading may be solitary, but in the aggregate books unite us. Stories allow us to share other people’s experiences communally—across schools and cities, countries and languages.

My old friend from France, Franz Kafka, perhaps put it best, describing not just the draw but also the necessity of dark reading. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” he wrote to a childhood friend. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Sometimes it takes a book to jolt you out of where you are. It doesn’t have to be a great book. Just the right book at the right moment, one that opens something up or exposes you to something new or somehow forces you to reexamine your life; the sustained and immersive experience of reading a book can do this in ways not even the best TV show or movie can. It can be altogether transformative.

In the words of Bulgakov, “Love caught us suddenly, leapt at us like a murderer appearing from nowhere in an alley, and struck us both down at once. Like lightning, like a Finnish knife! However, afterwards she insisted it was not so, that we had loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing one another, never having met…

There can certainly be pleasure in hate reading. As with The Fountainhead, I have hated my way through several books to the last page, not always out of generosity to the writer. It’s a force of will. You will be read no matter how hard you make it. Some say reading hateful books feels like time wasted—and with so little time, so many books, why bother with the bad? But there’s something bracing about reading a book you despise, because loathing is usually mixed with other emotions—fear, perverse attraction, even occasional, complicated strains of sympathy. It’s one of many reasons I believe in negative reviews. It can be interesting when a book provokes animosity. But hate in and of itself is not a very interesting response to a book, and, oh, how I hated Flashman.

If something happened to one of them that had happened to you, it meant you weren’t a freak; there was precedent. And if you could find out what they did about it, you might find your own solution, or at least learn what not to do. Through them, you could envisage an alternate existence, heroic or tragic or just more interesting than your own.

I hate-read every last horrible page of The Fountainhead alternating between fury and despair. When it was finally over, I willfully erased it from memory, only the vague echo of Dominique, stomping around in her evening gowns, stubbornly remaining. The book went directly into the trash, where it would never hurt anyone again. Some books are just not good.

Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way.

Because if I didn’t write it all down, I worry (naturally), I would forget it.

Like W. H. Auden, who once wrote, “Occasionally, I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only,” I considered certain books mine, and the idea that other people liked them and thought of them as theirs felt like an intrusion. (“Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it”—Auden, again.) I wanted to be the only one who knew about a book or at least to be the first one there.

But the more downtrodden characters, I positively adored. Anyone who was a heroin addict or knew a heroin addict or wrote about another heroin addict was good enough for me. Accounts of dead drug-addicted celebrities constituted their own lush genre, the more sordid the behavior and devastating the downfall, the better. I felt sorry for them, and this emotional largesse made me feel better about me.

My attraction to the dark side may have been that it allowed me to explore the forbidden from a safe distance, helping me draw distinctions between the kind of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to avoid.