Jeremy Reed > Quotes

“ What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.”
― Jeremy Reed

“I was thinking how I'd like to die and come back. I'd like to become invisible when I didn't want to do things, and then carry on living when I did. That way I could avoid punishment.”
― Jeremy Reed, Blue Rock

“Everything reminded him of something else: the fragrance of a peach-skin was like opening his stamp-album, the chack-chack of the wheatear not only recalled mist on the hills, but also reminded him of foxgloves, droplets of rain tapping from the mauve bells on to a dock leaf or fern. Ferns reminded him of his mother's soap, the luxurious tan-coloured lozenges that came to her in a box each christmas and birthday, and other scents too, the yellow of oriental jasmine, the pink of tea-rose, the green of mimosa. For all of these scents he could find a correlative within the spectrum of his own experience.”
― Jeremy Reed, Blue Rock

“From old habits the night always instilled in her a sense of imminent adventure. Those who slept by day walked the endless tunnel of the night. The stoned drag-queen collapsed in an alley, the tormented somnambuist who kept walking until dawn, the revenant, the fugitive, the vagrant, the nocturnal gathering of those consigned to the sulphur-blaze of the pit. She had known them all; the desperate, the hunted, the wolf slaking its thirst at a limed water-hole.”
― Jeremy Reed, Blue Rock

“If I (Lou Reed) hadn't heard rock 'n' roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. You know what I'm saying? Which would have been devastating - to think that everything everywhere was like it was where I came from. That would have been profoundly discouraging. ”
― Jeremy Reed, The Life and Music of Lou Reed