Stop-Time [1967] - Frank Conroy

"My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life."

Nominated for the National Book Award, Stop-Time is a uniquely original memoir that follows Conroy's depraved childhood in New York and South Florida. Chapter titles include "Savages," "Space and a Dead Mule," "Shit," "Death by Itself" and "Losing My Cherry." Essential reading!

Stop-Time Quotes

"Live was good, conditions were perfect for my work. But I would go to London once or twice a week in a wild, escalating passion of frustration, blinded by some mysterious mixture of guilt, moroseness, and desire. I wasn't after women, but something invisible, something I never found."

"The days were emptiness, a vast, spacious emptiness in which the fact of being alive became almost meaningless."

"Youth itself made him uncomfortable, more because he coveted the ancient scene of his own lost happiness than for the faint, barely flickering spark of lust it kindled in him."

"These people breathed failure, moving from town to town in an endless cycle of disillusionment."

"Is it the mindlessness of childhood that opens up the world?"

"Books were reality. I hadn't made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end."

"It was a delicate world in which one had to move carefully, dealing with elements one understood vaguely if at all, knowing only that some elements seemed to sustain life and some to threaten it."

"I imagined myself in total isolation and darkness, unable to reorganize, unable to make the slightest adjustments in the course of my life, finally and irrevocably in the hands of a disinterested fate."

"Sadness crept over me—a sadness I didn't question, a sadness so profound I understood it could not have come from life, or any source within my conceptual scope, but instead seeped into me from the very air, from the whole extant universe in which I was less than a speck, sadness that was not emotion but the awareness of vast emptiness."

"The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. 'I'm a novelist,' he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say."