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I Am Writing This Book Because We're All Going To Die - In The Loneliness Of My Own Life, My Father Dead, My Brother Dead, My Mother Faraway, My Sister And My Wife Far Away, Nothing Here But My Own Tragic Hands That Once Were Guarded By A World, A Sweet Attention, That Now Are Left To Guide And Disappear Their Own Way Into The Common Dark Of All Our Deaths, Sleeping In Me Raw Bed, Alone And Stupid: With Just This One Pride And Consolation: My Broke Heart In The General Despair And Opened Up Inwards To The Lord, I Made A Supplication In This Dream

-Jack Kerouac

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I Am Writing This

Jack Kerouac

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I Am Writing This Book Because We're All Going To Die - In The Loneliness Of My Own Life, My Father Dead, My Brother Dead, My Mother Faraway, My Sister And My Wife Far Away, Nothing Here But My Own Tragic Hands That Once Were Guarded By A World, A Sweet Attention, That Now Are Left To Guide And Disappear Their Own Way Into The Common Dark Of All Our Deaths, Sleeping In Me Raw Bed, Alone And Stupid: With Just This One Pride And Consolation: My Broke Heart In The General Despair And Opened Up Inwards To The Lord, I Made A Supplication In This Dream

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Burroughs Is The Greatest Satirical Writer Since Jonathan Swift.

The Cause Of The World's Woe Is Birth, The Cure Of The World's Woe Is A Bent Stick.

Your Buddhism Has Made You Mean Ray And Makes You Even Afraid To Take Your Clothes Off For A Simple Healthy Orgy

I Was Having A Wonderful Time And The Whole World Opened Up Before Me Because I Had No Dreams.

Way Far Back In The Beginning Of The World Was The Whirlwind Warning That We Could All Be Blown Away Like Chips And Cry- Men With Tired Eyes Realize It Now, And Wait To Deform And Decay- With Maybe They Have The Power Of Love Yet In Their Hearts Just The Same, I Just Don't Know What That Word Means Anymore- All I Want Is An Ice Cream Cone

And Just For A Moment I Had Reached The Point Of Ecstasy That I Always Wanted To Reach, Which Was The Complete Step Across Chronological Time Into Timeless Shadows, And Wonderment In The Bleakness Of The Mortal Realm, And The Sensation Of Death Kicking At My Heels To Move On, Wiht A Phantom Dogging Its Own Heels, And Myself Hurrying To A Plank Where All The Angels Dove Off And Flew Into The Holy Void Of Uncreated Emptiness, The Potent And Inconceivable Radiancies Shining In Bright Mind Essence, Innumerable Lotus-lands Falling Open In The Magic Mothswarm Of Heaven. - Sal Paradise

And He Had A Nice Home In Ohio With Wife, Daughter, Christmas Tree, Two Cars, Garage, Lawn, Lawnmower, But He Couldn't Enjoy Any Of It Because He Really Wasn't Free. It Was Sadly True.

The First Sip [of Tea] Is Joy, The Second Is Gladness, The Third Is Serenity, The Fourth Is Madness, The Fifth Is Ecstasy.

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.

After All, A Homeless Man Has Reason To Cry, Everything In The World Is Pointed Against Him.

Writing At Least Is A Silent Meditation Even Though You’re Going A Hundred Miles An Hour.

Between Incomprehensible And Incoherent Sits The Madhouse. I Am Not In The Madhouse.

So Therefore I Dedicate Myself, To My Art, My Sleep, My Dreams, My Labors, My Suffrances, My Loneliness, My Unique Madness, My Endless Absorption And Hunger Because I Cannot Dedicate Myself To Any Fellow Being.

It Made Me Think That Everything Was About To Arrive - The Moment When You Know All And Everything Is Decided Forever.

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 The Sigh Of The Sea Out There, With The Ma-wink Fallopian Virgin Warm Stars Reflecting On The Outer Channel Fluid Belly Waters. And If Your Cans Are Redhot And You Can't Hold Them In Your Hands, Just Use Good Old Railroad Gloves, That's All.

As I Grew Older I Became A Drunk. Why? Because I Like Ecstasy Of The Mind.

When You Start Separating People From Their Rivers, What Have You Got? Bureaucracy!

As Far As I'm Concerned The Only Thing To Do Is Sit In A Room And Get Drunk

And With Joy You Realize For The First Time "thinking's Just Like Not Thinking — So I Don't Have To Think Any More".

Eager For Bread And Love.

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-by. But We Lean Forward To The Next Crazy Venture Beneath The Skies.

If You Dont [sic] Say What You Want, What's The Sense Of Writing?

In My Medicine Cabinet, The Winter Fly Has Died Of Old Age.

Practice Kindness All Day To Everybody And You Will Realize You're Already In Heaven Now.

You Can't Live In This World But There's Nowhere Else To Go.

I Could Hear Dean, Blissful And Blabbering And Frantically Rocking. Only A Guy Who's Spent Five Years In Jail Can Go To Such Maniacal Helpless Extremes; Beseeching At The Portals Of The Soft Source, Mad With A Completely Phsycial Realization Of The Origins Of Life-bliss; Blindly Seeking To Return The Way He Came

I Wasn't Scared; I Was Just Somebody Else, Some Stranger, And My Whole Life Was A Haunted Life, The Life Of A Ghost.

Somewhere Along The Line, The Pearl Would Be Handed To Me.

One Day I Will Find The Right Words, And They Will Be Simple.

It's Okay, Girl, We'll Make It Till The Sun Goes Down Forever. And Until Then What You Got To Lose But The Losing? We're Fallen Angels Who Didn't Believe That Nothing Means Nothing.

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

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)

Who Doesn't Feel Studious When He Doesn't Have A Girl With A Riviera Suntan?

Marylou Was Watching Dean As She Had Watched Him Clear Across The Country And Back, Out Of The Corner Of Her Eye--with A Sullen, Sad Air, As Though She Wanted To Cut Off His Head And Hide It In Her Closet, An Envious And Rueful Love Of Him So Amazingly Himself, All Raging And Sniffy And Crazy-wayed, A Smile Of Tender Dotage But Also Sinister Envy That Frightened Me About Her, A Love She Knew Would Never Bear Fruit Because When She Looked At His Hangjawed Bony Face With Its Male Self-containment And Absentmindedness She Knew He Was Too Mad.

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.

Yeah," I Said, "but You're An Artist. You Don't Believe In Decency And Honesty And Gratitude. Where Shall We Eat?

Who Can Leap The World's Ties And Sit With Me Among White Clouds?

All He Needed Was A Wheel In His Hand And Four On The Road.

The Fact Was I Had The Vision... I Think Everyone Has... What We Lack Is The Method.

Dean And I Both Swayed To The Rhythm And The It Of Our Final Excited Joy In Talking And Living To The Blank Traced End Of All Innumerable Riotous Angelic Particulars That Had Been Lurking In Our Souls All Our Lives.

And The Stars Were Icicles Of Mockery

As We Crossed The Colorado-utah Border I Saw God In The Sky In The Form Of Huge Gold Sunburning Clouds Above The Desert That Seemed To Point A Finger At Me And Say, "pass Here And Go On, You're On The Road To Heaven.

Dean's California--wild, Sweaty, Important, The Land Of Lonely And Exiled And Eccentric Lovers Come To Forgather Like Birds, And The Land Where Everybody Somehow Looked Like Broken-down, Handsome, Decadent Movie Actors.

Maybe That's What Life Is... A Wink Of The Eye And Winking Stars.

I Swore I'd Be In Chicago Tomorrow, And Made Sure Of That, Taking A Bus To Chicago, Spending Most Of My Money, And Didn't Give A Damn, Just As Long As I'd Be In Chicago Tomorrow.

One Fast Move Or I'm Gone,' I Realize, Gone The Way Of The Last Three Years Of Drunken Hopelessness Which Is A Physical And Spiritual And Metaphysical Hopelessness You Can't Learn In School No Matter How Many Books On Existentialism Or Pessimisn You Read, Or How Many Jugs Of Vision-producing Ayahuasca Drink, Or Mescaline Take, Or Peyote Goop Up With -

But That's Alright Because Now Everything'll Be Alright & We'll Soothe The Forever Boys & Girls & Before We're Thru We'll Find A Name For This Goddam Golden Eternity & Tell A Story Too

The Tree Looks Like A Dog, Barking At Heaven.

No Man Should Go Through Life Without Once Experiencing Healthy, Even Bored Solitude In The Wilderness, Finding Himself Depending Solely On Himself And Thereby Learning His True And Hidden Strength

Is Virgin You Trying To Fathom Me

But On Top Of All That, The Feelings About Princess, I'd Also Gone Through An Entire Year Of Celibacy Based On My Feeling That Lust Was The Direct Cause Of Birth Which Was The Direct Cause Of Suffering And Death And I Had Really No Lie Come To A Point Where I Regarded Lust As Offensive And Even Cruel. "pretty Girls Make Graves," Was My Saying, Whenever I'd Had To Turn My Head Around Involuntarily To Stare At The Incomparable Pretties Of Indian Mexico.

But Night Would Come And With It The Mountain Moon And The Lake Would Be Moon - Laned And I'd Go Out And Sit In The Grass And Meditate Facing West, Wishing There Were A Personal God In All This Impersonal Matter.

We Were On The Roof Of America And All We Could Do Was Yell

If Moderation Is A Fault, Then Indifference Is A Crime.

That's The Story Of My Life Rich Or Poor And Mostly Poor And Truly Poor.

Story Of My Life

Beautiful Insane In The Rain

They Were Like The Man With The Dungeon Stone And Gloom, Rising From The Underground, The Sordid Hipsters Of America, A New Beat Generation That I Was Slowly Joining.

Rather, I Think One Should Write, As Nearly As Possible, As If He Were The First Person On Earth And Was Humbly And Sincerly Putting On Paper That Which He Saw And Experienced And Loved And Lost; What His Passing Thoughts Were And His Sorrows And Desires.

...but I Preferred Reading The American Landscape As We Went Along. Every Bump, Rise, And Stretch In It Mystified My Longing.

The Whole Mad Swirl Of Everything That Was To Come Began Then.

Ah, If I Could Realize, If I Could Forget Myself And Devote My Meditations To The Freeing, The Awakening And The Blessedness Of All Living Creatures Everywhere I'd Realize What There Is, Is Ecstasy.

My Witness Is The Empty Sky.

Roaring Dreams Take Place In A Perfectly Silent Mind. Now That We Know This, Throw The Raft Away.

What A Horror It Would Have Been If The World Was Real, Because If The World Was Real, It Would Be Immortal.

Because The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones.

But Yet, But Yet, Woe, Woe Unto Those Who Think That The Beat Generation Means Crime, Delinquency, Immorality, Amorality ... Woe Unto Those Who Attack It On The Grounds That They Simply Don't Understand History And The Yearning Of Human Souls ... Woe In Fact Unto Those Who Make Evil Movies About The Beat Generation Where Innocent Housewives Are Raped By Beatniks! ... Woe Unto Those Who Spit On The Beat Generation, The Wind'll Blow It Back.

The Golden Eternity Is { }

The More Ups And Downs, The More Joy I Feel. The Greater The Fear, The Greater The Happiness I Feel.

The Smog Was Heavy, My Eyes Were Weeping From It, The Sun Was Hot, The Air Stank, A Regular Hell Is L.a.

I Felt Like Lying Down By The Side Of The Trail And Remembering It All

Bop Began With Jazz But One Afternoon Somewhere On A Sidewalk Maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie Or Charlie Parker Or Thelonious Monk Was Walking Past A Men's Clothing Store On 42nd Street Or South Main In L.a. And From A Loudspeaker They Suddenly Heard A Wild Impossible Mistake In Jazz That Could Only Have Been Heard Inside Their Own Imaginary Head, And That Is A New Art. Bop.

I Think It's All Lovely Hallucination But I Love It Sorta.

I Like It Because Its Ugly

A Sociable Smile Is Nothing But A Mouth Full Of Teeth.

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.

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You Have Absolutely No Regard But Yourself And Your Damned Kicks. All You Think About Is What's Hanging Between Your Legs And How Much Money Or Fun You Can Get Out Of People And Then You Just Throw Them Aside. Not Only That But You're Silly About It. It Never Occurs To You That Life Is Serious And That There Are People Trying To Make Something Decent Out Of It Instead Of Just Goofing All The Time.

But They Need To Worry And Betray Time With Urgencies False And Otherwise, Purely Anxious And Whiny, Their Souls Really Won't Be At Peace Unless They Can Latch To An Established And Proven Worry And Having Once Found It They Assume Facial Expressions To Fit And Go With It, Which Is, You See, Unhappiness, And All The Time It All Flies By Them And They Know It And That Too Worries Them No End.

My Whole Wretched Life Swam Before My Weary Eyes, 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.

Whenever Spring Comes To New York I Can't Stand The Suggestion Of The Land That Come Blowing Over The River From New Jersey And I've Got To Go. So I Went.

There Are Worse Things Than Being Mad.

They Have Worries, They're Counting The Miles, They're Thinking About Where To Sleep Tonight, How Much Money For Gas, The Weather, How They'll Get There - And All The Time They'll Get There Anyway, You See.

The Bus Roared Through Indiana Cornfields That Night; The Moon Illuminated The Ghostly Gathered Husks; It Was Almost Halloween. I Made The Acquaintance Of A Girl And We Necked All The Way To Indianapolis. She Was Nearsighted. When We Got Off To Eat I Had To Lead Her By The Hand To The Lunch Counter. She Bought My Meals; My Sandwiches Were All Gone. In Exchange I Told Her Long Stories.

It Always Makes Me Proud To Love The World Somehow- Hate's So Easy Compared.

Burroughs Is The Greatest Satirical Writer Since Jonathan Swift. . . . The Net Result Of Naked Lunch Will Be To Make People Shudder At Their Own Lies, Will Be To Make Them Open Up And Be Straight With One Another. Swift And Rabelais And Sterne Accomplished A Step In That Direction, And Burroughs Another.

...do You Think God Made The World To Amuse Himself Because He Was Bored? Because If So He Would Have To Be Mean.

The Secret Of This Kind Of Climbing, Is Like Zen. Don't Think. Just Dance Along. It's The Easiest Thing In The World, Actually Easier Than Walking On Flat Ground Which Is Monotonous. The Cute Little Problems Present Themselves At Each Step And Yet You Don't Hesitate And You Find Yourself On Some Other Boulder You Picked Out For No Special Reason At All, Just Like Zen.~ Japhy

I Want To Marry A [guy], So I Can Rest My Soul With [him] Till We Both Get Old. This Can't Go On All The Time-- All This Franticness And Jumping Around. We've Got To Go Someplace, Find Something.

I Went One Afternoon To The Church Of My Childhood And Had A Vision Of What I Must Have Really Meant With "beat"... The Vision Of The Word Beat As Being To Mean Beatific... People Began To Call Themselves Beatniks, Beats, Jazzniks, Bopniks, Bugniks And Finally I Was Called The "avatar" Of All This.

I Looked Up At The Dark Sky And Prayed To God For A Better Break In Life And A Better Chance To Do Something For The Little People I Loved.

Holding Up My Purring Cat To The Moon. I Sighed.

You Seek Identity In The Midst Of Indistinguishab Le Chaos, In Sprawling Nameless Reality.

Everything I Wrote Was True Because I Believed What I Saw.

He Had Never Felt Anything Like That Before - Yet Somehow He Knew That From Now On He Would Always Feel Like That, Always, And Something Caught At His Throat As He Realized What A Strange Sad Adventure Life Might Get To Be, Strange And Sad And Still Much More Beautiful And Amazing Than He Could Ever Have Imagined Because It Was So Really, Strangely Sad.

My Aunt Once Said That The World Would Never Find Peace Until Men Fell At Their Women's Feet And Asked For Forgiveness.

"what Do You Want Out Of Life?" I Asked, And I Used To Ask That All The Time Of Girls.

Houses Are Full Of Things That Gather Dust

What Is He Aching To Do? What Are We All Aching To Do? What Do We Want?” She Didn’t Know. She Yawned. She Was Sleepy. It Was Too Much. Nobody Could Tell. Nobody Would Ever Tell. It Was All Over. She Was Eighteen And Most Lovely, And Lost.

She Talks With A Broken Heart - Her Voice Lutes Brokenly Like A Heart Lost, Musically Too, Like In A Lost Grove, It's Almost Too Much To Bear Sometimes Like Some Fantastic Futuristic Jerry Southern Singer In A Nightclub Who Steps Up To The Mike In The Spotlight In Las Vegas But Doesn't Even Have To Sing, Just Talk, To Make Men Sigh And Women Wonder I Guess.

I Felt Free And Therefore I Was Free.

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.

Ray, What You Got To Do Is Go Climb A Mountain.

Great Things Are Not Accomplished By Those Who Yield To Trends And Fads And Popular Opinion.

All Of Life Is A Foreign Country.

It Seemed Like A Matter Of Minutes When We Began Rolling In The Foothills Before Oakland And Suddenly Reached A Height And Saw Stretched Out Ahead Of Us The Fabulous White City Of San Francisco On Her Eleven Mystic Hills With The Blue Pacific And Its Advancing Wall Of Potato-patch Fog Beyond, And Smoke And Goldenness In The Late Afternoon Of Time.

Genius Gives Birth, Talent Delivers. What Rembrandt Or Van Gogh Saw In The Night Can Never Be Seen Again.

Desolation, Desolation, I Owe So Much To Desolation.

Anybody Doesn't Like These Pitchers Don't Like Potry, See? Anybody Don't Like Potry Go Home See Television Shots Of Big Hatted Cowboys Being Tolerated By Kind Horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, Unobtrusive, Nice, With That Little Camera That He Raises And Snaps With One Hand He Sucked A Sad Poem Right Out Of America Onto Film, Taking Rank Among The Poets Of The World. To Robert Frank I Now Give This Message: You Got Eyes.

Everything Is Perfect On The Street Again, The World Is Permeated With Roses Of Happiness All The Time, But None Of Us Know It. The Happiness Consists In Realizing That It Is All A Great Strange Dream.

I Realized That I Had Died And Been Reborn Numberless Times But Just Didn't Remember Because The Transitions From Life To Death And Back 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.

Don't Think Of Words When You Stop But To See Picture Better.

It Is Possible For The Human Spirit To Win After All.

I Had Nothing To Offer Anybody Except My Own Confusion.

Don't Touch Me, I'm Full Of Snakes.

Night Is Longer Than Day For Those Who Dream & Day Is Longer Than Night For Those Who Make Their Dreams Comes True.

Fear Life But Don't Die, Your Alone, Everybody's Alone, Oh Cody Pomeray You Can't Win You Can't Lose All Is Ephemeral All Is Hurt

You'd Be Surprised How Little I Knew Even Up To Yesterday

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 Journeys Across The Spaces Trying To Find It Again, And Knows He Never Will.

The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, Buy That Boy.

We Turned At A Dozen Paces, For Love Is A Duel, And Looked At Each Other For The Last Time.

While Looking For The Light, You May Suddenly Be Devoured By The Darkness And Find The True Light

I Mean, Why On Earth (outside Sickness And Hangovers) Aren't People Continually Drunk? I Want Ecstasy Of The Mind All The Time.

I Have All The Time In The World From Life To Life To Do What Is To Do, To Do What Is Done, To Do The Timeless Doing.

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.

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.

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.

I Was Suddenly Left With Nothing In My Hands But A Handful Of Crazy Stars.

The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones, The Ones Who Are Mad To Live, Mad To Talk, Mad To Be Saved.

We Tiptoed Around Each Other Like Heartbreaking New Friends.

Details Are The Life Of Prose.

Down On The Lake Rosy Reflections Of Celestial Vapor Appeared, And I Said, "god, I Love You" And Looked To The Sky And Really Meant It. "i Have Fallen In Love With You, God. Take Care Of Us All, One Way Or The Other." To The Children And The Innocent It's All The Same.

Vanity Of Vanities… All Is Vanity.’ You Kill Yourself To Get To The Grave. Especially You Kill Yourself To Get To The Grave Before You Die; And The Name Of The Grave Is ‘success’, The Name Of That Grave Is Hullabullo Boom Boom Horseshit.

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)

Never Dreaming, Was I, Poor Jack Duluoz, That The Soul Is Dead. That From Heaven Grace Descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail To Tell Me; No Example Inside My First And Only Skin. That Love Is The Heritage, And Cousin To Death. That The Only Love Can Only Be The First Love, The Only Death The Last, The Only Life Within, And The Only Word . . . Choked Forever.

All The Souls To Explore! - It's Not So Necessary To Love, Really, As It Is To Settle Something Deep With All Of Those Who Really Matter. Love And Hate Are The Same Things, Differently Sifted Through Personal... Pride, Or What Have You... Personal Pride Or Even Just Personal-ness.

The One Thing That We Yearn For In Our Living Days, That Makes Us Sigh And Groan And Undergo Sweet Nauseas Of All Kinds, Is The Remembrance Of Some Lost Bliss That Was Probably Experienced In The Womb And Can Only Be Reproduced (though We Hate To Admit It) In Death. But Who Wants To Die?

So Long And Take It Easy, Because If You Start Taking Things Seriously, It Is The End Of You.

To Think That So Much Comes To So Little, To Think That Life Is Really Short.

Always Pull Back-and See How Silly We Must Look To God.

It's Only Through Form That We Can Realize Emptiness

What Does It Mean That I Am In This Endless Universe, Thinking That I'm A Man Sitting Under The Stars On The Terrace Of The Earth, But Actually Empty And Awake Throughout The Emptiness And Awakedness Of Everything? It Means That I'm Empty And Awake, That I Know I'm Empty And Awake, And That There's No Difference Between Me And Anything Else.

Here I Was At The End Of America...no More Land...and Nowhere Was Nowhere To Go But Back

I Spent My Entire Youth Writing Slowly With Revisions And Endless Rehashing Speculation And Deleting And Got So I Was Writing One Sentence A Day And The Sentence Had No Feeling. Goddamn It, Feeling Is What I Like In Art, Not Craftiness And The Hiding Of Feelings.

I'm Writing This Book Because We're All Going To Die.

La Is The Loneliest And Most Brutal Of American Cities; Ny Gets God-awful Cold In The Winter But There's A Feeling Of Wacky Comradeship Somewhere In Some Streets. La Is A Jungle.

No Fear Or Shame In The Dignity Of Yr Experience, Language & Knowledge

Let The Mind Beware, That Though The Flesh Be Bugged, The Circumstances Of Existence Are Pretty Glorious.

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.'

I Petted The Dogs Who Didn't Argue With Me Ever. All Dogs Love God. They're Wiser Than Their Masters.

...most Of The Time We Were Alone And Mixing Up Our Souls Ever More And Ever More Till It Would Be Terribly Hard To Say Good-by.

I'd Also Gone Through An Entire Year Of Celibacy Based On My Feeling That Lust Was The Direct Cause Of Birth Which Was The Direct Cause Of Suffering And Death.

Suffering And Death

The Words Are Clear As In The Reflection Of The World On The Water. Therefore Write The Word At Once, Everywhere, From Now Till Your Hand Is Paralyzed, For There Will Be Your Work For God, Since You Can Not Work For God In Other Ways, And Would Not, & Don't Know How, Or Bend That Way, From Habit, & From Talent In The Use & Signification & Arrangement Of The Word.

The Only Truth Is Music.

Inspirational Music

And Nobody Knows What’s Going To Happen To Anybody Besides The Forlorn Rags Of Growing Old

And Silence Is The Golden Mountain

No Fear Or Shame In The Dignity Of Your Experience, Language, And Knowledge.

And Still The Void Is Still And'll Never Move - But I Will Be The Void, Moving Without Having Moved.

We Lay On Our Backs Looking At The Ceiling And Wondering What God Had Wrought When He Made Life So Sad And Disinclined.

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.

We Fumed And Screamed In Our Mountain Nook, Mad Drunken Americans In The Mighty Land. We Were On The Roof Of America And All We Could Do Was Yell, I Guess - Across The Night.

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.

Last Night I Walked Clear Down To Times Square & Just As I Arrived I Suddenly Realized I Was A Ghost - It Was My Ghost Walking On The Sidewalk.

We Wandered In A Frenzy And A Dream (301).

The Bus Roared On. I Was Going Home In October. Everybody Goes Home In October.

She Brooded And Bit Her Rich Lips: My Soul Began Its First Sink Into Her, Deep, Heady, Lost; Like Drowning In A Witches' Brew, Keltic, Sorcerous, Starlike.

What's In Store For Me In The Direction I Don't Take?

Galatea Was A Serious Girl. She Was Pale And Looked Like Tears All Over. Big Ed Passed His Hand Through His Hair And Said Hello. She Looked At Him Steadily. "where Have You Been? Why Did You Do This To Me?" And She Gave Dean A Dirty Look; She Knew The Score. Dean Paid Absolutely No Attention; What He Wanted Now Was Food; He Asked Jane If There Was Anything. The Confusion Began Right There.

And I Will Die, And You Will Die, And We All Will Die, And Even The Stars Will Fade Out One After Another In Time.

I Saw That My Life Was A Vast Glowing Empty Page And I Could Do Anything I Wanted.

Something Great Is About To Happen To Me: I'm About To Love Somebody Very Much.

Life Was Dense, Dark, Ancient. They Watched Dean, Serious And Insane At His Raving Wheel, With Eyes Of Hawks. All Had Their Hands Outstretched. They Had Come Down From The Back Mountains And Higher Places To Hold Forth Their Hands For Something They Thought Civilization Could Offer, And They Never Dreamed The Sadness And The Poor Broken Delusion Of It.

Rocks Are Space, And Space Is Illusion.

For Life Is Holy And Every Moment Is Precious.

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.

It Was My Dream That Screwed Up, The Stupid Hearthside Idea That It Would Be Wonderful To Follow One Great Red Line Across America Instead Of Trying Various Roads And Routes.

-no Girl Had Ever Moved Me With A Story Of Spiritual Suffering And So Beautifully Her Soul Showing Out Radiant As An Angel Wandering In Hell And The Hell The Selfsame Streets I'd Roamed In Watching, Watching For Someone Just Like Her And Never Dreaming The Darkness And The Mystery And Eventuality Of Our Meeting In Eternity.

A Fine Thing To Be Talking About Angels In This Day When Common Thieves Smash The Holy Rosaries Of Their Victims In The Street.

The Cowboy Music Twanged In The Roadhouse And Carried Across The Fields, All Sadness. It Was All Right With Me. I Kissed My Baby And We Put Out The Lights.

Pretty Girls Make Graves

No Time For Poetry But Exactly What Is.

Mainly I've Been Back To My Books And Writings And Being Nice And Quiet And Lazy. As I'm Writing This, The Radio Says There's A Foot Of Snow Falling On Long Island. I Really Love Snow And Wish I Could Take A Long Walk In It Right Now.

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)

Better To Sleep In An Uncomfortable Bed Free, Than Sleep In A Comfortable Bed Unfree.

The Sun Goes Down Long And Red. All The Magic Names Of The Valley Unrolled - Manteca, Madera, All The Rest. Soon It Got Dusk, A Grapy Dusk, A Purple Dusk Over Tangerine Groves And Long Melon Field; The Sun The Color Of Pressed Grapes, Slashed With Burgundy Red, The Fields The Color Of Love And Spanish Mysteries. I Stuck My Head Out The Window And Took Deep Breaths Of The Fragant Air. It Was The Most Beautiful Of All Moments.

Something That You Feel Will Find Its Own Form.

Nothing Behind Me, Everything Ahead Of Me, As Is Ever So On The Road.

Struggle To Sketch The Flow That Already Exists Intact In Mind.

I Want A Blaze Of Light To Flame In Me Forever In A Timeless, Dear Love Of Everything. And Why Should I Pretend To Want Anything Else?

...[the Photographer] Can Be Considered A Kind Of Disembodied Burrowing Eye, A Conspirator Against Time And Its Hammers. His Work, Print After Print Of It, Seems To Call To Be Shown Before The Decay Which It Portrays Flattens All... Here Are The Records Of The Age Before An Imminent Collapse.

Some's Bastards, Some's Ain't. That's The Score.

Because Anybody Can Write, But Not Everybody Invents New Forms Of Writing. Gertrude Stein Invented A New Form Of Writing And Her Imitators Are Just "talents."

Never Mistake Talking About Writing For Actual Writing.

As Early Pioneers In The Knowing, That When You Lose Your Reason, You Attain Highest Perfect Knowing.

If You Own A Rug You Own Too Much.

Man Lowers His Head And Lunges Into Civilization, Forgetting The Days Of His Infancy When He Sought Truth In A Snowflake Or A Stick. Man Forgets The Wisdom Of The Child.

Sal, We Gotta Go And Never Stop Going 'till We Get There.' 'where We Going, Man?' 'i Don't Know But We Gotta Go.

The Air Was Soft, The Stars So Fine, The Promise Of Every Cobbled Alley So Great, That I Thought I Was In A Dream.

I Just Won't Sleep," I Decided. There Were So Many Other Interesting Things To Do.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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