Neon arabesques

So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish...

New Orleans is a dead museum.

William Burroughs - Naked Lunch, 13

Beautiful things in black letters

There was a time when, if I had had to opt between two types of blindness, I would have chosen to be blind to the splendour of the sea, the mountains, the sunset in Rio de Janeiro, so as to have eyes to read beautiful things in black letters on a white background.

Chico Buarque - Budapest, 98

Engraved in the light

For the dark finds ways of being engraved in the light.

Emiliana Torrini - Serenade

Never know its speed

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed
and who try to make slaves of all of us
and they have their music and we have ours
theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare
and without their musical and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to,
we'd not have any opposite to compare our music with
and like the drifting wind
hitting against no obstacle
we'd never know its speed,
its power...

Woody Guthrie

Some secret vein

And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven.

Truman Capote - A Christmas Memory, 157 (of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Penguin)

Telegraph poles, like violin bridges

The telegraph poles, like violin bridges, flew past with spasms of guttural music.

Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter, 71

In the footsteps of Pacino

The fact is, my little freedom flight isn't working out as well as I'd hoped. I swing between the giddiness of my newfound solitude and the loneliness of same. I make a lot of panicked phone calls to my boyfriend from museums that begin with descriptions of Brueghel paintings and end with me sobbing, "What am I going to do?" I am homesick, and since I can't go home, I might as well go to the next closest thing - Sicily. I know Sicily. And I love the part of The Godfather when Michael's hiding out, traipsing around his ancestral hills, walking the streets of his father's birthplace, Corleone.

I take a night train from Rome down the boot and wake up in the Sicilian capital, Palermo. I feel ridiculous. I thought of myself as a serious person and it didn't seem like serious travel people travel hundreds of miles out of their way to walk in the footsteps of Al Pacino.

I don't feel so silly, however, that I'm above tracking down a bakery and buying a cannoli, my first. I walk down to the sea and eat it. It's sweeter than I thought it would be, more dense. The filling is flecked with chocolate and candied orange. Clemenza was right: Leave that gun! Take that cannoli!

Sarah Vowell - Take The Cannoli, 49 (of Take the Cannoli)

Truth that lacks lyricism

Never get so attached to a poem,
you forget truth that lacks lyricism

Joanna Newsom - En Gallop