"And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all."

"I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show."

"The road is life."

"I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?"

"It's a sort of furtiveness. Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the 'public', a kind of beatness I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are " and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world It's something like that. So I guess you might say we're a beat generation."

"Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water."

"You're a Genius all the time."

"A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."

"They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-"Where are you going?" which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, "Where are you going?"-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society "Looking for peace."

"We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco."

"Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever."

"I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do?"

"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."

"It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night."

"And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves."

"Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'...But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.'There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!"

"Be in love with your life, every detail of it."

"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved."

"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land."

"At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will."

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

"This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do."

"Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it."

"Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict."

"Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that."

"He had become completely mad in his movements; He seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying 'Am,' and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking."

"I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that'spractically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, ofcourse."

"All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together."

"Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?"

"Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'Page 100."

"If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings."

"She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do."

"And rain will fall on our eaves."

"At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth."

"Pain or love or danger makes you real again...."

"I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why."

"Do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean."

"Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much."

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."

"Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow."

"Buds in the snow-the deadly fightbetween two birds."

"Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts."

"After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him."

"Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now."

"What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave."

"Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last."

"And I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad."

"In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted."

"Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)"

"I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was."