"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on."

"He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there."

"All of life is a foreign country."

"You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse."

"Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back."

"I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life."

"Accept loss forever."

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

"Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars."

"The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby - Talk about yr hot peace."

"A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

"It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now - girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever."

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I'll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone's lapel and make them confess to me and to all."

"Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization."

"The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow."

"Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars..."

"And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change."

"There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go."

"The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words."

"Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said "We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!"-Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how."

"The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles."

"Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone."

"My eyes were glued on lifeand they were full of tears."

"A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of."

"I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true it's like finding a river of gold when you haven't even got a cup to save a cupful you've but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness."

"In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June-- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers--they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night."

"Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!"

"Love is bitter, death is sweet."

"Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate."

"Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub."

"I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go."

"Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance."

"I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with."

"An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else..."

"In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise."

"Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder."

"We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301)."

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy."

"And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon."

"You can't teach the old maestro a new tune."

"Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple."

"The stars are fixed in rooftops like ink."

"Is Virgin you trying to fathom me."

"All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235)."

"Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears..."

"I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too."

"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end."

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."

"The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, governments and governors will go, the things made by men's hands will go, buildings will always crumble - only the earth will remain the same, there will always be men on the earth in the morning, there will always be the things made by God's hands - and all this history of cities and congress now will go, all modern history is only a littering Babylon smoking under the sun, delaying the day when men again will have to return to earth, to the earth of life and God."