Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. William S. Burroughs
About This Quote

"The Crawling King" is a reference to the I Ching or Book of Changes, which is thought to have been written around 1000 BC. The I Ching is widely considered by many to have an innate divinatory aspect. According to the book, when one comes across an image described in the text, it must be understood in terms of the hexagrams that surround it. For example, in the above excerpt, the hexagrams that surround "The Crawling King" are respectively one of "Fire," two of "Water," three of "Wind," and six of "Earth." They are obvious to anyone who reads these lines.

Source: Naked Lunch

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More Quotes By William S. Burroughs
  1. There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
  2. Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.
  3. Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
  4. A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
  5. The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
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