Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by James Frey - Page 2

I'm tired of making people sad and I'm tired of disappointing them and I'm tired of seeing them break. I have seen this too many times. He will be the last.

...if you can accept the truth and live with it your heart will be at peace.

Light streamed through one of the windows and across her face and I have never seen anything or anyone so beautiful in my life. If my heart had stopped at that moment I would have fallen happy and fallen full and I would have seen in life all that I had wanted to see and all that I needed to see. Fall. Let me fall.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

Its not just a smile of momentary happiness. When it disappears from my face, it will stay with me.

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

People don't want to accept the responsibility for their own weakness, so they place the blame on something that they're not responsible for, like disease or genetics.

In my mind my obituary is done.It is done and it is right. It tells the truth and as awful as it can be, the truth is what matters. It is what I should be remembered by, if I'm remembered at all. Remember the truth. that is all that matters

Be patient and wait. Your mud will settle. Your water will be clear.

All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost.

We stare into each other's eyes and softly kiss speaking and saying more with the movement of our lips and the tips of our fingers than words will allow us to say. Words can't say this. The one word love means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love.

Addicts, as a group, generally score far above average o intelligence tests. Why? You tell me. I guess maybe we're smart enough to have figured out how shitty things are and we decide addiction is the only way to deal with it.

It's the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?

I turn and I look back across the lake. The mist is gone and the ice diminished, the drip of the icicles quick and heavy. The sun is up and the sky is blue empty blue light blue clear blue. I would drink the sky if I could drink it, drink it and celebrate it and let it fill me and become me. I am getting better. Empty and clear and light and blue. I am getting better.

What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.

There are no words and there is no singing, but the music has a voice. It is an old voice and a deep voice, like the stump of a sweet cigar or a shoe with a hole. It is a voice that has lived and lives, with sorrow and shame, ecstasy and bliss, joy and pain, redemption and damnation. It is a voice with love and without love. I like the voice, and though I can't talk to it, I like the way it talks to me. It says it is all the same, Young Man. Take it and let it be.

I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

This moment and this chance, they are the same, and they are mine if I choose them,and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye, don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving.

There is, though, nothing that prepares us for the worst things in our life. There is nothing you can do to stop the shock, or buffer the pain.

We live in a world that's very fast, where we get bombarded with huge amounts of information very quickly, and I have tried to tailor my voice to the times, which I think, writers, over the course of history - many have always done.

I felt like I had lost something. But not something silly, like my keys or my gum; more like my arm or my foot, something that really mattered. Like something that I could live without, but would make life much harder if it were missing. And life is hard enough. Life is hard enough with everything we're given.

I look at pastries and cakes, tarts and pies. My body craves sugar, always craves sugar. Years of alcohalism and the high level of sugar in alcohal created the craving, which I feed with candy and soda.

Faith is the fool's excuse.

My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe.

Sleep is still difficult I sleep for three or four hours a day. Usually sometime in the afternoon. I walk in the cold, keep myself numb. I cry less, and less." (James Frey, pg.88)

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

You should at all times be showing a well-motivated character overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal.

You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible.

Ive never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

He pulled out turned west and started driving towards the glow it was thousands of miles away, he started driving towards the glow.

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

Practice not wanting, desiring, judging, doing, fighting, knowing. Practice just being. Everything will fall into place.

I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.

I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never.

I think men who can cry are strong men

But that's part of faith. Believing and knowing despite what other people say, and despite what the world might think of your beliefs.

Love only brought me lonliness and horror.

On the other couch a women sits with a young boy looking through a picture book about Babar the Elephant. When I find a magazine and I lean back to start reading it, I can see the women watching me out of the corner of her eye. She moves closer to the child and she leans over and kisses his forehead. I know why she does it and i don't blame her.

I meet a third man he's an old man he trips in the street he falls and I help him up, walk him to the curb. He shakes my hand says keep the faith, young man. I ask him what he means, he says keep running and don't let them catch you.

The calm. If there is God or something Higher for me it is this. The calm. If there is something that will hold me when I need to hold it is this the calm. There is no anger, no rage, no Fury. There is no want, no need, no desire. There is no hatred no shame no regret. There is no grief, no sadness, no depression. There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live.

For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

The feeling of arms around me, of love in my heart, it was more powerful than any of the negativity I knew was existing in the world for me. That feeling of love killed it all.

A miracle is changing someone's life. Freeing them from whatever bonds them. Giving them the gift of being able to live the way they dream of living.

If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they're given.

I hope nobody took the Razzle Dazzle Rose.

Words can't say this. The one word love means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough.

Most of the time, it's not the concept, but the execution of craft that counts.

To write a damn good thriller, you need a killer attitude.

I go to my Room and I drink and I smoke some cigarettes and I think about her. I drink and I smoke and I think about her and at a certain point blackness comes and my memory fails me.

To live with angels and chase their dreams.

She feels and she cries. It is to be admired.

But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.

I say to myself if you believe deeply in your heart you must defy, and if you are willing to pay for your defiance, you must always do it, even though the pain may be much. Too many times in our lives we do not do it, and we pay even more.

Laughing and Love. They are both drugs.

It's been great getting better with you.

He tells me I look as if I could use a hugand i laugh at him and he ignores me and steps forward and puts his arms around me and hugs me. I warm at the simple pleasure of human contact and for the first time in a long time i actually feel good." (James Frey, pg.38)