Piri Thomas Quotes

The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind.

Mira, I wanna tell you something. I ain't got time to tell you what I should've when I had time, but I dig you a whole lot." "Deeg you?" she asked, puzzled. I explained to her what it meant and told her that I would write it to her in Spanish and say it like it was.

Drip of a drop, Don't name it a tear, It's hard to cry with tears, harder without, To smother a sob without a sound, to bite your forefinger in helplessness, and cry out Hey! Where's the pill I can take to cure this? What's the doctor's name? What operation can save me?

Piri Thomas' book Down These Mean Streets followed me around for years, in the corner of my eye on bus terminal bookracks. Finally, in a gritted teeth desperation I faced the damn thing and said "OK, tell me." I sweated my way through it in two nights: Gang fights, knifings, robberies, smack, prison. It's the standard Puerto Rican street story, except he lived. The junkies could be my younger brothers. The prisoners could be them. I could be the prostitute, the welfare mother, the sister and lover of junkies, the child of alcoholics. There is nothing but circumstance and good English, nothing but my mother marrying into the middle class, between me and that life.

The Piri Reis map, showing the North Pole in Egypt;