From the Prologue:
* I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: "I will smoke opium when I grow up."

* After this my friend "packed me in" because the relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the others, and I found myself a good deal alone.

* I'd once got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off a finger joint to impress someone who interested me at the time. The nut-house doctors had never heard of Van Gogh.

* The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict.

* I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.

* The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivation in any other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked.

* If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict's special need. You don't decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict.

* When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing.

* Junk is a cellular equation that teaches te user facts of general validity. I have learned a great deal from using junk: I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution. I experienced the agonizing deprivation of junk sickness, and the pleasure of relief when junk-thirsty cells drank from the needle. Perhaps all pleasure is relief.


From the text:
* He looked at me, surprised. "You use it?" "Now and then." "It's bad stuff," he said, shaking his head. "The worst thing that can happen to a man. We all think we can control it at first. Sometimes we don't want to control it." He laughed.

* Weed is positively not habit-forming. You can smoke weed for years and you will experience no discomfort if your supply is suddenly cut off. I have seen tea heads in jail and none of them showed withdrawal symptoms. I have smoked weed myself off and on for fifteen years, and never missed it when I ran out. There is less habit to weed than there is to tobacco. Weed does not harm the general health. In fact, most users claim it gives you an appetite and acts as a tonic to the system. I do not know of any other agent that gives as definite a boot to the appetite. I can smoke of tea and enjoy a glass of California sherry and a hash house meal.

* When you use junk the feel of water on the skin is unpleasant for some reason, and junkies are reluctant to take a bath.

* A lot of nonsense has been written about the changes people undergo as they get a habit. All of a sudden the addict looks in the mirror and does not recognize himself. The actual changes are difficult to specify and they do not show up in the mirror. That is, the addict himself has a special blind spot so far as the progress of his habit is concerned. He generally does not realize that he is getting a habit at all. He says there is no need to get a habit if you are careful and observe a few rules, like shooting every other day. Actually, he does not observe these rules, but every extra shot is regarded as exceptional. I have talked to many addicts and they all say they were surprised when they discovered they actually had the first habit.

* As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next, "stashes" and "scripts," "spikes" and "droppers." The addict himself often feels that he is leading a normal life and that junk is incidental.

* "Why do you need narcotics, Mr. Lee?" is a question that stupid psychiatrists ask. The answer is, "I need junk to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast. I need it to stay alive."

* But in a very literal sense, kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk.

* At night, I would take two strips of benzedrine and go out to a bar where I sat right by the jukebox. When you're sick, music is a great help. Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric, and a few Louis Armstrong records.

* Almost worse than the sickness is the depression that goes with it. One afternoon, I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-second street.

* I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowser's want: "Junk here!"

* I didn't see anybody around, and besides I wanted to stay off, or at least I thought I wanted to stay off.

* "Half is plenty," he said. "I tell you it's strong." "This will be all right," I said. But as soon as I took the needle out of the veins, I knew it wasn't all right. I felt a soft blow in the heart. Pat's face began to get black around the edges, the blackness spreading to cover his face as though it were actually changing color. I could feel my eyes roll back in the sockets.

* The cops began stopping addicts on the street and examining their arms for needle marks. If they found marks, they pressured the addict to sign a statement admitting his condition so he could be charged under the "drug addicts law." The addicts were promised a suspended sentence if they would plead guilty and get the new law started.

* A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

* People vary in the way junk sickness affects them. Some suffer mostly from vomiting and diarrhea. The asthmatic type, with narrow and deep chest, is liable to violent fits of sneezing, watering at eyes and nose, in some cases spasms of the bronchial tubes that shut off the breathing. In my case, the worst thing is lowering of blood pressure with consequent loss of body liquid, and extreme weakness, as in shock. It is a feeling as if the life energy has been shut off so that all the cells in the body are suffocating. As I lay there on the bench, I felt like I was subsiding into a pile of bones.

* No one will stand still for junk sickness unless he is in jail or otherwise cut off from junk. The reason it is practically impossible to stop using and cure yourself is that the sickness lasts five to eight days. Twelve hours of it would be easy, twenty-four possible, but five to eight days is too long.

* It is possible to detach yourself from most pain--injury to teeth, eyes, and genitals present special difficulties--so that the pain is experienced as neutral excitation. From junk sickness there seems to be no escape. Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.

* Junk is not a "good kick." The point of junk to a user is that it forms the habit. No one knows what junk is until he is junk sick.

* After a junk cure is complete, you generally feel fine for a few days. You can drink, you can feel real hunger and pleasure in food, and your sex desire comes back on you. Everything looks different, sharper. Then you hit a sag. It is an effort to dress, get out of a chair, pick up a fork. You don't want to do anything or go anywhere. You don't even want junk. The junk craving is gone, but there isn't anything else. You have to sit this period out. Or work it out. Farm work is the best cure.

* You don't need will power to say no to junk when you are off. You don't want it.

* "You know how it is when you start to come off the stuff." He indicated his genitals, pointing with all his fingers, then turning the hand palm up. A concrete gesture as though he had picked up what he wanted to talk about and was holding it in his palm to show you. "You get a hard-on and shoot off right in your pants. It doesn't even have to get hard."

* Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is--orgones, life force--that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is a place where the new anti-life force is breaking through.

* Sodomy is as old as the human species.

* I had been off junk three months at this time. It took me just three days to get back on.

* An addict may be ten years off the junk, but he can get a new habit in less than a week; whereas someone who has never been addicted would have to take two shots per day for two months to get any habit at all. I took a shot daily for four months before I could notice withdrawal symptoms. You can list the symptoms of junk sickness, but the feel of it is like no other feeling and you can not put it into words.

* Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time--the spine is where it supposedly holes up--and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.

* Junkies all wear hats, if they have hats. They all look alike, as if wearing a costume identical in some curious way that escapes exact tabulation. Junk has marked them all with its indelible brand.

* When you look back over a year on the junk, it seems like no time at all. Only the periods when you were sick stand out. You remember the first few shots of a habit and the shots when you were really sick.

* Junk is a biological necessity when you have a habit, an invisible mouth. When you take a shot of junk you are satisfied, just like you ate a big meal. You don't want another shot right away. But using C you want another shot as soon as the effect wears off. If you have C in the house, you will not go out to a movie or go out at all until the C is all gone. One shot creates an urgent desire for another shot to maintain the high. But once the C is out of your system, you forget about it. There is no habit to C.

* Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.

* Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.

* When you are getting plenty of junk, kicking looks easy. You say, "I'm not getting any kick from the shots any more. I might as well quit." But when you cut down into junk sickness, the picture looks different.

* When you kick the spike you get worse until you hit the third day, and you think, this is it: You couldn't feel worse. But the fourth day is worse. After the fourth day relief is dramatic. And on the sixth day there is only a pale shadow of junk sickness.

* I knew that I did not want to go on taking junk. If I could have made a single decision, I would have decided no more junk ever. But when it came to the process of quitting, I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up as though I did not have control over my actions.

* I wasn't high on the hop; I was high on withdrawal tone-up. Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency. When the junk is cut off, emergency reactions continue. Sensations sharpen, the addict is aware of his visceral processes to an uncomfortable degree, peristalsis, and secretion go unchecked.

* When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junkie quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk.


From the deleted chapter 28 of the original manuscript:
* Most animals have been addicted to junk under experimental conditions. After receiving the shots for a period of ten days or so, the animal reacts to the hypodermic as if it were a food plate, rushing eagerly forward to get his shot. When junk is withdrawn, the animal shows withdrawal symptoms: No other substance has produced this syndrome in animals--that the animal eagerly seeks the substance as if it were food.

* It seems that a user does not get a positive kick from junk. What he gets is relief from withdrawal sickness. Possibly all pleasure is basically relief from a condition of need, or tension. Junk is the medium in which the junk-dependent cells live. When junk is cut off junk cells die, and excess histamine is produced to carry away the dead cells.

* During addiction, junk is a biologic necessity, like food, water, or sex. There is no other substance that becomes in this way a part of the biologic rhythm of the body. When you are junk sick you dream about junk.

* Junk seems to displace the sex drive. When you are on junk the sex drive virtually disappears. When you start to kick you experience sex feelings of adolescent intensity, often spontaneous orgasms.

* Junkies live a long time and often look younger than they are. When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. Most users periodically kick the habit, which involves shrinking of the organism and replacement of the junk-dependent cells.


Introduction to the original "Junk" manuscript:
* The action of junk on the user is generically different from the action of any other drug. I think that junk is transitional between living and dead matter, between animal and vegetable life. You cannot avoid the feeling that junk is in some way alive.

* Junk needs a host before it can take on its special junk qualities, because junk is a parasite that can live only in the blood of a user.