Roky Erickson Quotes

It just took all of that to come to a screeching halt, to get to the point of having nothing, for me to finally realize, Hey, what are you fighting with this for? Until then, I hadn't claimed my faith as my own; I had just grown up with it.

I've had a great metamorphosis in my life. I struggled for a number of years because I was identified with that image of the Seventies.

Conversion is not my intention. Changing religion is not easy. You may develop some kind of confusion or difficulties.

I couldn't remember when I'd stopped willing to be trans and started wanting to be trans. If there were a difference, I'd forgotten it.

I'm an amalgamation of what I've needed to be. Part scholar, part rebel, part nobleman, part Mistborn, and part soldier. Sometimes I don't even know myself. I had a devil of a time getting all those pieces to work together. And, just when I'm starting to get it figured out, the world up and ends on me.

I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am.

When did I stop being me?

Many times I feel different like a different person.

I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.

I was a runner who happened to be a Christian. I needed to become a Christian who happened to be a runner.

Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).

In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

[My work is] maybe about me maybe not wanting to be me and wanting to be all these other characters. Or at least try them on.

and because what we learn in the dark remains all our lives, a noise like the sea, displacing the day's pale knowledge, you'll come to yourself in a glimmer of rainfall or frost, the burnt smell of autumn, a meeting of parallel lines, and know you were someone else for the longest time, pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist, lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.

It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again.

I turned my back on the devil, turned my back on the angel too.

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit I relate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

For me, I've never been too concerned of what people think of me, so now as the youngest Baldwin brother in Hollywood making movies while simultaneously being a charismatic evangelical born again Christian who's an evangelist - that's a pretty crazy combination. But early on in my walk of faith I said a very personal prayer and made a commitment to God. I said if you reveal yourself to me in a way that is more thrilling and powerful and exciting than anything I've experience thus far, then I'll go anywhere and do whatever you want. And that can be very tough.

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

I had quite a religious upbringing. I gave my life over to Christ at 11. I took it back when I was about 14.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.