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...

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.

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.

…because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)

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

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

„w Kalifornii nie trzeba mieć domu, bo nigdy nie jest zimno” mówi Slim i śmieje się radośnie. „Rany w życiu nie widziałaś takich ślicznych słonecznych dni, że przez większość roku nawet nie potrzeba płaszcza ani...

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life

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

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

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

He was out to get back everything he’d lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever.

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!

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like...

Quella strada del passato si srotolava confusamente di fianco a noi come se la tazza della vita si fosse rovesciata e ogni cosa fosse impazzita.

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like ‘Japhy Ryder, equally...

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...

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...

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night....

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...