Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.
In San Francisco - life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the complexities of life, highlighting the interplay of hope, dreams, love, and pain.
Hunter S. Thompson’s quote encapsulates the essence of life in San Francisco, portraying it as a mixture of beauty and hardship. It emphasizes the continuous flow of life where hope and love coexist with loneliness and despair. The imagery of various characters—like the young girl dreaming of love and the drunk under the bridge—illustrates the contrasting experiences people face. Ultimately, the quote suggests that while life is filled with pain, it also holds beauty, and time continues to move forward.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
To inspire students, a teacher might use this quote to discuss the duality of life's experiences.
More from Hunter S. Thompson
All quotes →As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.
Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.
When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.
Similar quotes
Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.
Life is a play that does not allow testing. So, sing, cry, dance, laugh and live intensely, before the curtain closes and the piece ends with no applause.
"And how are you feeling?" asked Patrick."Oh, I'm grand." Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."
The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.