Junk Quotes

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“The more material we lose, the less we have. The less we have, the more we win.”
― Anthony Liccione

“When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. – A user is a continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed.”
― William S. Burroughs

“We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race

“It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep. ”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars”
― Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems

“Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means of increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Junk?” Lina repeated, incredulous. Oh, she wasn’t about to let that pass.”
― Jaleigh Johnson, The Secrets of Solace

“Silence is golden but too long a silence an imitation junk”
― Dr. Amit Abraham

“Some people who have been working out regularly for months or even years are still out of shape because the number of cheat days they have in a week exceeds six.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We all have a million things vying for our attention. If you tell yourself that you don’t have enough time to clear out your junk, you might be delaying the well-being and relief you could experience by tackling it. If not now, when?”
― Lisa J. Shultz, Lighter Living: Declutter. Organize. Simplify.

“Besides shopping at garage sales, I love hosting garage sales. Every year my mom and I dig through our houses and find a bunch of crap (I mean really terrific stuff) to sell so we can earn some money so we can go back out and buy some more crap (I mean really terrific stuff) that we’ll use for a bit and then turn around and garage-sale in a couple of years. It’s the circle of life suburban style.”
― Jen Mann, People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Competitive Crafters, Drop-Off Despots, and Other Suburban Scourges

“Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.”
― H. R. Rookmaaker, A arte moderna e a morte de uma cultura

“You know what Mrs. Shure, the librarian, told me?” “What’s that, Theo?” his father asked.
“God does not make junk.”
Ted stared into his tumbler, the dwindling ice cubes sloshing at the bottom of the glass. His fidget finger tapped at the glass. Knocking the ice against the wall of the tumbler and turning his face upward, Ted looked at Theo.
“Therefore, I am not junk,” said Theo.
“Yuh.”
“And I came from you. You are not junk either, Dad. Just because you didn’t shoot a gun in France or just because you didn’t become an engineer, doesn’t mean you are any less than any other man. Dad, both you and I have made mistakes, but we are not junk.”
― Steven James Taylor, the dog

“That's American know-how for you. It keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk.”
― Paul Auster, Timbuktu

“The processed food industry hijacked our palates by using three highly addictive weapons -- sugar, salt and wheat.”
― Nancy Mure

“Now famous and later on the junk yard.”
― Deyth Banger

“Online & social media subscribers are hungry for content, but when newsfeeding them for growth, try not to get them juiced up for more email junk they’ll trash over trunk…quality over quantity is the preferred principle thing!”
― Tracey Bond

“Junk food is television for tongues.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sometimes I just like to sit and ponder just sitting. For in the rarely visited expanse that this creates, I realize how much junk I’ve thought to be treasure and how much treasure I have junked.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“After shopping the online Black Friday sales, I found that my computer was infested with junk that was making it run really slow.”
― Steven Magee

“The search for a material paradise is a flight away from humanity into the sterile nonlife of mechanisms where everything is perfect until it becomes junk.”
― John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Silas still owned the junk shop on Breyten Road, and only the very foolish would classify it as having anything to do with antiques; few in Breytenville owned antiques, and even fewer looked to acquire them. But for a knickknack at the right price, there was always a market, and for the right price any knickknack could easily be put on the market. Desperate times, desperate pleasures, that’s what Silas always said.”
― Jean-Luke Swanepoel, The Thing About Alice

“When you eat junk food, junk food eats you up.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“I found the USA medical care system to be junk. I had to develop my own diagnosis and treatments to recover.”
― Steven Magee

“English: "Every book is rubbish until you understand how to read it."

Česky: „Každá kniha je brak jen do chvíle, než pochopíš, jak ji číst.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“You’re here, which means somebody loves you, which means you deserve to be loved.

The things God creates aren’t junk.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir