Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs turns self-destruction into a travel itinerary: go far enough out, and eventually the return trip gets canceled. The line has the offhand fatalism of someone describing a long walk, which is exactly why it lands. He refuses melodrama. Instead, he smuggles existential dread in under the guise of casual scheduling, the way an addict might talk about “one more time” while already bargaining with the void.

“Out” is doing double duty. It’s the bender, the jag, the late-night chemical adventure, but it’s also exile from ordinary consciousness: the writer leaving the safe, policed language of respectable society. Burroughs’ work is built on that premise. He treats perception like a system you can hack, and he’s willing to wreck the hardware to find the back door. The subtext is that the edge isn’t a place you visit; it’s a habitat you acclimate to. At some point, “getting so far out” stops being rebellion and starts being drift.

Context matters because Burroughs isn’t playacting danger. His life carried real collateral damage (most notoriously, killing his wife) and his mythology is inseparable from addiction, paranoia, and the Beat-to-counterculture pipeline. Read that way, the sentence is both warning and bravado: a grim little prophecy and a dare to keep pushing past limits. It captures the Burroughs paradox: he’s chasing freedom so relentlessly it begins to resemble a death wish.