Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.
But no matter, the road is life.
Not only was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool.
What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
My witness is the empty sky.
I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.
I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
They'll eat your heart alive Every time.
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.
We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far.
So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.
Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness...
The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view.
It's all too much and not enough at the same time.
Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.
If you own a rug you own too much.
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the word and would raise mean's souls to joy.
Sure, baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard—mañana,a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.
People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal.
And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhat far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then.
As for his hobby, drawing, he was better at that than most artists alive today and I always knew he was really a great young artist pretending to be withdrawn so people would leave him alone, also so people wouldn't ask him to get a job.
The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me.
Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.
All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
I couldn't meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make?
Sometimes during the night I'd look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness.
Can't you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything?
I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking' and ‘enjoying' what they call ‘living', I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don't dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they're angels.
What a horror it would have been if the world was real.
I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my pocket.
I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.
Oh, smell the people! yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. Ah, God! Life!
He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind.
Every night I still ask the Lord, "Why?" and havent heard a decent answer yet.
We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
They never asked, I kept offering.
The straight line will take you only to death.
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.
We stopped in the unimaginable softness (293).
Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies (214).
I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life - This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours.
Life is not an apology.
