Pages 45 to 87

1. Pages 45 to 87 Discussion Part Three

2. I guess it’s worth having your self-esteem destroyed if there was a free toy involved…I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say about me to get [the magazine] (46).

3. Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kids you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it (47).

4. “They’re pot dealer shoes… They are one hundred percent St-Henri shoes” (48).

5. [The apartment] reminded me of a photograph I’d seen in a National Geographic magazine of a hospital in Romania (51).

6. It was a street of illusions for newcomers, filled with run-down cafes, bars, heroin dealers, and street vendors. You could live the la vie-en-rose there (52).

7. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that happened to other people’s parents (53).

8. I wished that I could steal Jules’ new steel-toed boots, too, in order to keep him out of trouble (54).

9. Who could not be taken in by a newborn tattoo, glowing as bright as a stigmata? (56)

10. If you want a child to love you, then you should go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for your return. That child will turn YOU into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible (59).

11. There was a bicycle out front, locked to a gate; [Felix] had forgotten the combination, and he would try guessing it every morning (61).

12. “My God. Do I actually sound like this? All this time I thought that I was a great singer, but I don’t have any talent whatsoever!” (74)

13. [Johnny] yanked me toward him and his chin smacked into my face. I felt something in me come undone and put up my hand up to my mouth and spit out a tooth (64).

14. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jReNeEHH2lQ

15. As I walked out into the evening, I wished that I was on drugs too. Oliver was a junkie and he had more in common with my dad then I did (71).

16. How did you know that the universe still existed a few feet in front of the car? How could you know that God was continuing to imagine it all? How could you be sure that he hadn’t forgotten about the road and the you wouldn’t soon be driving into nothingness? (72)

17. We all laughed so hard when Frederic came over and Jules gave him [a cardboard sign that said he was a Vietnam vet]. I fell right off the kitchen chair (73).

18. I had been polluted with the ridiculous dreams of junkies. I had gotten the ridiculous ego that comes with a heroin high by proxy (74).

19. I slinked out, still without any connections and deeply humiliated. I had been turned away at the door of the adult world (77).

20. I just took the words “bum, “hobo,” and “street person” out of my vocabulary. You never really get to know anyone when you associated them with those words (78-9).

21. It is the speech of the homeless person. It is a sermon to no one in particular. I was feeling homeless and I in turn felt the need for that kind of spirituality (81).

22. You wouldn’t be stunned by anything in this state… There would be nothing horrific in life, but then again, there wouldn’t be anything wonderful either…Some people wanted to feel this way, but I didn’t. This separation from feeling was Jules’ remedy to life (87).

23. Thank You.