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).

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

Smith, you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.’ The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts...

Pain or love or danger makes you real again….

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

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

And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! – and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in...

Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by...

And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

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...

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk...

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...

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...

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

And what do I think about? What thoughts do I have! – What thoughts! a whole host, multitude, and world of thoughts, I keep devising new ones and reworking old ones, some of the old...

…the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines…

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

I dunno, remember when we were in East St. Louis with George, and Jack you said you’d love those beautiful dancing girls if you knew they would live forever as beautiful as they are?” (p....

Non si può vivere in questo mondo, ma non c’è nessun altro posto dove andare.

…the restaurant itself is weird especially because of a big raunch mad thicklipped sloppy young Fillipino woman sitting alone at the end of the restaurant gobbling up her food obscenely and looking at us insolently...

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

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...

Sometimes I’d yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel – “What is the meaning of the void?” The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

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…

One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American ‘diplomacy’ throughout the Fellaheen world: – stiff offcious...

Sembra che io abbia una costituzione che non regge l’alcol e ancor di meno l’idiozia e l’incoerenza.

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

Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not “publishing’s” –

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

In a sense, I’m mad (and withdrawn from life) while they’re sane, human, normal – but in another sense, I speak from the depths of a vision of truth when I say that this continual...

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

When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

Basta seguire la strada e prima o poi si fa il giro del mondo. Non può finire in nessun altro posto, no?

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

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...

They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a...

Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out...

…but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

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...

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...

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize ‘The stars are words’ and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize...

and rain will fall on our eaves.

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...

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 never yawn...

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...

Tutte le notti continuo a chiedere al Signore, “Perché?” E ancora non ho avuto una risposta decente.

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...

I know everything’s alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our...