Here's how to make love stay.

I finished Still Life With Woodpecker a couple weeks ago (Grant, if you're reading this, thank you).  I enjoyed it so much that I thought I'd share some of my favorite parts. It's extensive.  Yuk!

"Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top."

"'I no longer know what love is.  A week ago I had a lot of ideas.  What love is and how to make it stay.  Now that I'm in love, I haven't a clue.  Now that I'm in love, I'm completely stupid on the subject.'"

"No, and it's not an easy time to be an outlaw, either.  There's no longer any moral consensus.  In the days when it was generally agreed what was right and what was wrong, an outlaw simply did those wrong things that needed to be done, whether for freedom, for beauty, or for fun.  The distinctions are blurred now, a deliberately wrong act - which for the outlaw is right - can be interpreted by many others to be right - and therefore must mean that the outlaw is wrong.  You can't tilt windmills when they won't stand still...But it doesn't really bother me.  I've always been a square peg in every round hole but one...I guess love is the real outlaw."

"Who knows how to make love stay?
1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half.  It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair.  Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides.  Face southwest.  Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language.  Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face.  Find love.  Tell it you are someone new.  It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night.  Tell it the world is on fire.  Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it.  Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right.  Fall asleep.  Love will be there in the morning."

"There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.  Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time.  Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon."

"Don't let yourself be victimized by the age you live in.  It's not the times that will bring us down, any more than it's society.  When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution.  Just like those poor neurotics at the Care Fest.  There's a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance.  You buy that, you pay with your soul.  It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks.  What limits people is lack of character.  What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.  Yuk."

"The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that.  Loving makes love.  Loving makes itself.  We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.  Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?"

"Love is the ultimate outlaw.  It just won't adhere to any rules.  The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.  Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.  That would mean that security is out of the question.  The words 'make' and 'stay' become inappropriate.  My love for you has no strings attached.  I love you for free."


"When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us.  When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising.  This can go on and on - series polygamy - until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment.  Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.  Hey, that's pretty good.  If I had pencil and paper, I'd write that down...When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic.  Magic is just naturally present then.  We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more.  One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone.  We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up.  What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start.  It's hard work, especially when it seems superfluous or redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay."

"They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy."

"How can one person be more real than any other?  Well, some people do hide and others seek.  Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe suck people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell.  Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding.  But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.  'Maybe he was an insane bastard, but he was a genuine insane bastard,' said Leigh-Cheri, 'and I loved him more than I've ever loved anybody - or ever will.'"


"'The pyramid is the bottom, and the top is us.  The top is all of us.  All of us who're crazy enough and brave enough and in love enough.  The pyramids were built as pedestals that the souls of the truly alive and the truly in love could stand upon and bark at the moon.  And I believe that our souls, yours and mine, will stand together atop the pyramids forever'...'You're better equipped for this world than I am,; she said. 'I'm always trying to change the world.  You know how to live in it.'"

"When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes.  It's that simple.  This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself.  The love connection may be merely a device to put is in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last.  It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still.  Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us.  We glimpse it when we stand still.  The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery.  When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice.  But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: (1) Everything is part of it. (2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

And finally, find a boy to read this out loud to you.  It's my favorite.

"Yes, and I love the trite mythos of the outlaw.  I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw.  I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw.  I love the fey smile of the outlaw.  I love the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw.  I love the way respectable men sneer and say 'outlaw.'  I love the way young women palpitate and say 'outlaw.'  The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it.  All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that.  'When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free': that's a graffito seen in Anacortes, and I love that.  There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially.  Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all."


Just read the book already.