Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t romanticize rock bottom; he weaponizes it. “Desperation” here isn’t a mood, it’s a solvent. It strips away the polite narratives that keep people functional and trapped, leaving “raw material” you can actually build with. The line flatters no one: it implies most of what we call identity is just habit plus ideology, and habit is stubborn until pain makes it negotiable.

The real bite is in the second sentence. “Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in” is an absolutist dare, the kind Burroughs loved because it cuts through self-help optimism. He’s not talking about swapping one lifestyle for another; he’s talking about abandoning the internal operating system. The subtext is anti-sentimental and faintly predatory: if you want out, you may have to betray your own story about who you are, what you deserve, even what counts as reality. Escape becomes less a journey than an exorcism.

Context matters because Burroughs wrote as someone obsessed with control systems - addiction, the state, language itself. Coming out of mid-century America’s moral hygiene and Cold War paranoia, he understood “belief” as a kind of leash: comforting, socially approved, and quietly coercive. So the quote lands like a warning and a promise. Drastic change isn’t a motivational poster; it’s an amputative act. Desperation supplies the force, but the price is faith in your previous self.