I well remember how the thoughts I had up to the time of my discharge from the jail on every occasion were modified immediately after discharge, and after getting first-hand information myself. Somehow or other the jail atmosphere does not allow you to have all the bearings in your mind.
The reason so many of us lose our bearings about practising early in life is that we practice in living rooms with other family members in earshot - and healthy practice would simply sound too obnoxious, intrusive, repetitious and unmusical for others to hear without annoyance.
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
The cross is not just a badge to identify us. . . it is also the compass which gives us our bearings in a disoriented world.
I have better use for my brain than to poison it with alcohol. To put alcohol in the human brain is like putting sand in the bearings of an engine.
The thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks away in any direction. There's always a new neighborhood to discover, a new place to lose your bearings in, and yet however alien it seems you can escape. You can always get a cab. All of life's problems can be solved by hailing a cab.
Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.
It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.
