Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared.

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958).

I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily -- all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.'

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

Last night I walked clear down to Times Square and just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost -- it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.

Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.

Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rubbing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night... (p. 128).

This is a thing which astonishes me no end, but affects you not.

There is a blessedness surely to be believed,
and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.

The straight line will take you only to death.

I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now.... ... it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it his own way and then we'd have something to read in our old age.

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.

As I was hiking down the mountain woth my pack I turned and I knelt on the trail and said Thank you, Shack. The I added Blah with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would know what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

It's terrible never to find a father in a world chock-full of fathers of all sorts.

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... there are millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.

The road must eventually lead to the whole world.