Henry Rollins Summer Quotations

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man's October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer's death as winter tightens its grip.

August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

August brings into sharp focus and a furious boil everything I've been listening to in the late spring and summer.

In the summer of '84, you just couldn't escape the Born in the USA record.

The streets lie, the sidewalks lie, everything lies You can try and read it but you're gonna get it wrong...all wrong The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter but you're gonna get it wrong And it's gonna sink its teeth into your flesh and pull you to the bottom.

I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. Theres not a lot that isnt dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines throught the Christ machines. Through the eyes of throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through loves howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spiderss jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the line in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes.

Every summer, around late July and into August, I find myself in Europe, performing at any festival that will have me.

In the late summer of 1986, the band I had been in for five years stopped playing. Suddenly, I was on my own. This new state of bandlessness was, at first, traumatic. When your group breaks up, a lot of broken parts hit the ground.

Don't go to summer camp. Bury your parents in the backyard and have the place to yourself.

I recycle and try to be nice to the earth. But flora and fauna have always interested me, and it is because of so many years of summer camp and growing up in DC with Rock Creek Park fairly near me, or Glover Park; I lived in Glover Park for a while and that park was in my backyard.

People who keep a large snake in their apartment building, which happens quite a bit, all of a sudden, within two summers, have a 14-foot animal that's eating adult rabbits, and needs quite a bit of room and quite a bit of heat. That's the animal that gets put in the back of a pick-up truck and dumped into the Florida Everglades or the city lake, or just left on a doorstep - again, it's quite often the animal that suffers.

I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like.

We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost.

As a young person growing up in Washington, D.C., summers were hot, humid and relentless. My friends and I grew more restless and adventurous with every passing year.

The streets lie, the sidewalks lie, everything lies You can try and read it but you're gonna get it wrong...all wrong The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter but you're gonna get it wrong And it's gonna sink its teeth into your flesh and pull you to the bottom.