Life's Pleasures Quote by Gregory Corso

The shrugging opener, "Anyway", is Corso’s sleight of hand: a verbal cigarette flick tossed at the moralists. He frames street survival as a kind of improvised competence ("did pretty good") until the state re-enters the story with the blunt finality of "caught". That pacing matters. The sentence runs like a breathless confession, but it’s also a performance of how poverty compresses time: you act, you eat, you get grabbed. No room for the luxury emotion of regret.

Corso’s detail choices needle the reader’s sense of proportionality. He doesn’t steal jewels; he steals food. The crime is both concrete and symbolically humiliating, exposing a society where sustenance is gatekept behind glass. "Kicked in a restaurant window" is visceral, almost comic-book violent, but the target is telling: not a home, not a person, but an institution of comfort and paid appetite. A restaurant is where hunger becomes leisure. Breaking that boundary turns a basic need into trespass.

The syntax keeps responsibility oddly distributed. Corso owns the action ("I kicked", "I took"), yet the climax is passive: "I was grabbed". Agency drains away right at the moment power asserts itself, suggesting the real inevitability isn’t the theft but the capture. In Beat-era context, this is also an anti-bildungsroman: the street kid’s education isn’t romanticized; it’s bureaucratized. The subtext is a critique of moral storytelling itself. He refuses a neat redemption arc, offering instead a hard, almost casual portrait of hunger meeting law, and losing.