Autobiography Quotes

“It was probably nothing but it felt like the world.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“David [Bowie] quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ and I loudly tell him, ‘You know, I’ve had SO LITTLE sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Could things get any worse? Why, yes, little one. Be patient.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Now comes the hour to choose between being acceptable to others or being acceptable to one's own self, for we must kill our true selves off in order to survive.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something- otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything?”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“I can see through the human heart, and I know that life’s biggest prize is to have the day before you as yours alone to do with as you wish.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“I shake like a ship in a storm. It is a fact that even warming moments overwhelm me with despair, and this is why I am I.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“You either approve of violence or you don't, and nothing on earth is more violent or extreme than the meat industry.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom--awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be with the words that we write:

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
And all's to do again.

I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse then it actually is--especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone--thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was quite alright--for isn't that partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who manage to feast on them. You see you can't have it both ways”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Cats will be cats.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“It is a fact that even warming moments overwhelm me with despair, and this is why I am I.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“The brain speculates but the heart knows.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“The abyss in which I live hasn't the wit to save itself from savage ignorance, and I now feel assured that I am not in the company of my own species (at least, I hope I am not, for it I am, then I am they). Dear God, let time pass quickly, and let this end. Let me be older and let this mediocrity pass as a dream - one in which the utmost was done to bury me alive.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“And what do YOU like in life?' [the priest] asks me, ready to play the patronising game at my expense in order to raise a giggle from the rest of the class, thus rendering him popular for a few perverse minutes. 'Mott The Hoople,' I answer truthfully.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“My notepad resting on my lap takes the scribbles of unspoken truth: effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“These were times when all were judged squarely and fairly on their musical tastes, and a personal music collection read as private medical records.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“I spend every day apologizing or saying the wrong thing, and I am born sorry.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Some murders are well worth their prison term.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“We live in forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester, where everything lies wherever it was left over one hundred years ago. The safe streets are dimly lit, the others not lit at all, but both represent a danger that you’re asking for should you find yourself out there once curtains have closed for tea.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“Another form of church, football was all that stood between earth and God.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“The Smiths fallout continues in Denver, where someone has held an entire radio station at gunpoint until DJs make the promise to play Smiths music. Unwittingly, this gunman is providing the very first active radio promotion on behalf of the Smiths, and evidently a loaded gun is what it takes to get a Smiths song on the airwaves.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“C´mon, Manchester, ´says singer Boy George, ´I thought you were supposed to be hip?´ No, we´re just automaton snobs with an excess of intolerance -- you really must forgive us.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“the search for a listener is fruitless.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there?”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times- even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography

“My social status leaps after decades of disqualification on grounds of radiation. The doorbell rings and there stands Vanessa Redgrave. 'Marcie,' she begins, and then goes on about social injustice in Namibia, and how we must all build a raft by late afternoon — preferably out of coconut matting.”
― Morrissey, Autobiography