And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
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.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life
So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry
But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?
I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.
After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
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!
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.
I’d rather be thin than famousbut I’m fatpaste that in your broadway show
Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
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.
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…
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.
What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave…
Here I was at the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back.
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
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…
Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!
Don’t tell them too much about your soul. They’re waiting for just that.
We’ve got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning?
After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to 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…
I’m back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it’s my one and only world, and I’ll do the best I can.
Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not “publishing’s” –
I feel impossibly sad and like I’ll die, what can we do?
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.
Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?
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.
One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
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…
…but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.
I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air – air you can kiss – and palms.
He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.
There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.
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).
…of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth.
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.
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.
The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.
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.
Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)
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.
You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.
A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.
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.
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.
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.
Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!
Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I’ll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.
And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.
I clearly saw the skeleton underneathall this show of personalitywhat is left of a manand all his pride but bones?
I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.
This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.
I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
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.
…do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.
I’ll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that – 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
The Grim Reaper isn’t grim at all; he’s a life-saver. He isn’t grim because he isn’t anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.
Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?
Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
Soon I’ll find the right words, they’ll be very simple.
And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.
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?
…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.
My eyes were glued on lifeand they were full of tears.
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.
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are “happy,” O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of “happy nuts.” (p. 200)
And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.
…Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim ‘Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing’…Page 100.
It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.
Snap your fingerstop the world – rain falls harder
…the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines…
Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds
I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.
At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.
I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion
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.
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
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.
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.
I made myself famous by writing ‘songs’ and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.
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.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.