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I Told Terry I Was Leaving. She Had Been Thinking About It All Night And Was Resigned To It. Emotionlessly She Kissed Me In The Vineyard And Walked Off Down The Row. We Turned At A Dozen Paces, For Love Is A Duel, And Looked At Each Other For The Last Time.

-Jack Kerouac

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I Told Terry I

Jack Kerouac

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I Told Terry I Was Leaving. She Had Been Thinking About It All Night And Was Resigned To It. Emotionlessly She Kissed Me In The Vineyard And Walked Off Down The Row. We Turned At A Dozen Paces, For Love Is A Duel, And Looked At Each Other For The Last Time.

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I Didn't Know What To Say. I Felt Like Crying, Goddammit Everybody In The World Wants An Explanation For Your Acts And For Your Very Being.

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

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

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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.

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.

Details Are The Life Of Prose.

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

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

I Like Too Many Things And Get All Confused And Hung-up Running From One Falling Star To Another Till I Drop. This Is The Night, What It Does To You. I Had Nothing To Offer Anybody Except My Own Confusion.

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

The Tree Looks Like A Dog, Barking At Heaven.

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.

For The First Time In My Life The Weather Was Not Something That Touched Me, That Caressed Me, Froze Or Sweated Me, But Became Me.

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There Is Universal Substance Which Is Divine Substance Because Where Else Can It Be?

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Don't Use The Phone. People Are Never Ready To Answer It. Use Poetry.

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Write In Recollection And Amazement For Yourself.

If Critics Say Your Work Stinks It's Because They Want It To Stink And They Can Make It Stink By Scaring You Into Conformity With Their Comfortable Little Standards. Standards So Low That They Can No Longer Be Considered "dangerous" But Set In Place In Their Compartmental Understandings.

There Was Nothing To Talk About Anymore. The Only Thing To Do Was Go.

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

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I Told Terry I Was Leaving. She Had Been Thinking About It All Night And Was Resigned To It. Emotionlessly She Kissed Me In The Vineyard And Walked Off Down The Row. We Turned At A Dozen Paces, For Love Is A Duel, And Looked At Each Other For The Last Time.

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And The Stars Were Icicles Of Mockery

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Nothing Ever Happened - Not Even This

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Paris Is A Woman But London Is An Independent Man Puffing His Pipe In A Pub.

Suppose We Suddenly Wake Up And See That What We Thought To Be This And That, Ain't This And That At All?

Beat Generation

Cliches Are Truisms And All Truisms Are True

Who Knows, My God, But That The Universe Is Not One Vast Sea Of Compassion Actually, The Veritable Holy Honey, Beneath All This Show Of Personality And Cruelty?

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.

I Clearly Saw The Skeleton Underneath All This Show Of Personality What Is Left Of A Man And All His Pride But Bones?

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Stick At It Like A Benni Addict

I Was Surprised, As Always, Be How Easy The Act Of Leaving Was, And How Good It Felt. The World Was Suddenly Rich With Possibility.

My Fault, My Failure, Is Not In The Passions I Have, But In My Lack Of Control Of Them.

Oftentimes An Originator Of New Language Forms Is Called 'pretentious' By Jealous Talents. But It Ain’t Whatcha Write, It’s The Way Atcha Write It.

It Is Not My Fault That Certain So-called Bohemian Elements Have Found In My Writings Something To Hang Their Peculiar Beatnik Theories On.

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 Yard Was Full Of Tomato Plants About To Ripen, And Mint, Mint, Everything Smelling Of Mint, And One Fine Old Tree That I Loved To Sit Under On Those Cool Perfect Starry California October Nights Unmatched Anywhere In The World.

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.

And Never Really Thought I'd Amount To Anything. It Was Precisely What I Wanted The Whole World To Think; Then I Could Sneak In, If That's What They Wanted, And Sneak Out Again, Which I Did.

Will You Love Me In December As You Do In May?

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

Forgive Everyone For Your Own Sins And Be Sure To Tell Them You Love Them Which You Do.

Return Those Shoes To The Shoemaker Return This Hand To My Father This Pillow To The Pillowmaker Those Slippers To The Shop. That Wainscot To The Carpenter, But My Mind My Tranquil And Eternal Mind Return It To Whom?

Then It's Goodbye, Sangsara For Me Besides, Girls Aren't As Good As They Look And Samadhi Is Better Than You Think When It Starts In Hitting Your Head In With Buzz Of Glittergold Heaven's Angels, Wailing, Saying We've Been Waiting For You Since Morning, Jack Why Were You So Long Dallying In The Sooty Room? This Transcendental Brilliance Is The Better Part (of Nothingness I Sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop.

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

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 Details Are The Life Of It, I Insist, Say Everything On Your Mind, Don’t Hold Back, Don’t Analyze Or Anything As You Go Along, Say It Out.

Live, Travel, Adventure, Bless, And Don't Be Sorry.

The Page Is Long, Blank, And Full Of Truth. When I Am Through With It, It Shall Probably Be Long, Full, And Empty With Words.

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."

I Don't Wanta Hear All Your Word Descriptions Of Words Words Words You Made Up All Winter, Man I Wanta Be Enlightened By Actions.

I'm Not A Beatnik. I'm A Catholic.

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.

At Night I Closed My Eyes And Saw My Bones Threading The Mud Of My Grave.

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.

I Promise I Shall Never Give Up, And That I'll Die Yelling & Laughing.

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

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

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.

Soon It Got Dusk, A Grapy Dusk, A Purple Dusk Over Tangerine Groves And Long Melon Fields; The Sun The Color Of Pressed Grapes, Slashed With Burgandy Red, The Fields The Color Of Love And Spanish Mysteries.

I Nudged Myself Closer To The Ledge And Closed My Eyes And Thought 'oh What A Life This Is, Why Do We Have To Be Born In The First Place, And Only So We Can Have Our Poor Gentle Flesh Laid Out To Such Impossible Horrors As Huge Mountains And Rock And Empty Space,' And With Horror I Remembered The Famous Zen Saying, 'when You Get To The Top Of A Mountain, Keep Climbing.' The Saying Made My Hair Stand On End; It Had Been Such Cute Poetry Sitting On Alvah's Straw Mats.

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

All Day Long Wearing A Hat That Wasn't On My Head

God Was Gone; It Was The Silence Of His Departure. It Was A Rainy Night. It Was The Myth Of The Rainy Night. Dean Was Popeyed With Awe. This Madness Would Lead Nowhere. I Didn't Know What Was Happening To Me, And I Suddenly Realized It Was Only The Tea That We Were Smoking; Dean Had Bought Some In New York. It Made Me Think That Everything Was About To Arrive - The Moment When You Know All And Everything Is Decided Forever.

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

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?

The Only Truth Is Music.

Inspirational Music

Don't Tell Them Too Much About Your Soul. They're Waiting For Just That.

We All Agree It's Too Big To Keep Up With, That We're Surrounded By Life, That We'll Never Understand It, So We Center It All In By Swigging Scotch From The Bottle And When It's Empty I Run Out Of The Car And Buy Another One, Period.

But I Remember Seeing A Mess Of Leaves Suddenly Go Skittering In The Wind And Into The Creek, Then Floating Rapidly Down The Creek Towards The Sea, Making Me Feel A Nameless Horror Even Then Of 'oh My God, We're All Being Swept Away To Sea No Matter What We Know Or Say Or Do

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

And This Is The Way A Novel Gets Written, In Ignorance, Fear, Sorrow, Madness, And A Kind Of Psychotic Happiness As An Incubator For The Wonders Being Born.

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.

Ah, Life Is A Gate, A Way, A Path To Paradise Anyway, Why Not Live For Fun And Joy And Love Or Some Sort Of Girl By A Fireside, Why Not Go To Your Desire And Laugh.

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

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.

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.

I Felt Free And Therefore I Was Free.

Bein Crazy Is The Least Of My Worries.

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.

Are We Fallen Angels Who Didn't Want To Believe That Nothing Is Nothing And So Were Born To Lose Our Loved Ones And Dear Friends One By One And Finally Our Own Life, To See It Proved?

Be In Love With Your Life, Every Detail Of It.

Now The Mountains Were Getting That Pink Tinge, I Mean The Rocks, They Were Just Solid Rock Covered With The Atoms Of Dust Accumulated There Since Beginningless Time. In Fact I Was Afraid Of Those Jagged Monstrosities All Around And Over Our Heads. "they're So Silent!" I Said. "yeah Man, You Know To Me A Mountain Is A Buddha. Think Of The Patience, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years Just Sitting There Bein Perfectly Perfectly Silent And Like Praying For All Living Creatures In That Silence And Just Waitin For Us To Stop All Our Frettin And Foolin.

Avoid The World, It's Just A Lot Of Dust And Drag And Means Nothing In The End.

I Don't Know, I Don't Care, And It Doesn't Make Any Difference.

Besides, All My New York Friends Were In The Negative, Nightmare Position Of Putting Down Society And Giving Their Tired Bookish Or Political Or Psychoanalytical Reasons, But Dean Just Raced In Society, Eager For Bread And Love.

I Suddenly Discovered The Delight Of Rebellion.

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

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

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

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 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 An Old Dream, Like A Piece Of Forgotten Song Drifting Across The Water, Most Of All Like Golden Eternities Of Past Childhood Or Past Manhood And All The Living And The Dying And The Heartbreak That Went On A Million Years Ago And The Clouds As They Pass Overhead Seem To Testify (by Their Own Lonesome Familiarity) To This Feeling.

I Feel Guilty For Being A Member Of The Human Race.

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 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.

The Silence Is So Intense That You Can Hear Your Own Blood Roar In Your Ears But Louder Than That By Far Is The Mysterious Roar Which I Alwas Identify With The Roaring Of The Diamond Wisdom, The Mysterious Roar Of Silence Itself, Which Is A Great Shhhh Reminding You Of Something You've Seemed To Have Forgotten In The Stress Of Your Days Since Birth.

Is Virgin You Trying To Fathom Me

And I Shudder Sometimes To Think Of All That Stellar Mystery Of How She Is Going To Get Me In A Future Lifetime, Wow - And I Seriously Do Believe That Will Be My Salvation, Too. A Long Way To Go.

I Realized These Were All The Snapshots Which Our Children Would Look At Someday With Wonder, Thinking Their Parents Had Lived Smooth, Well-ordered Lives And Got Up In The Morning To Walk Proudly On The Sidewalks Of Life, Never Dreaming The Raggedy Madness And Riot Of Our Actual Lives, Our Actual Night, The Hell Of It, The Senseless Emptiness.

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

Work From Pithy Middle Eye Out, Swimming In Language Sea.

Eager For Bread And Love.

At Lilac Evening I Walked With Every Muscle Aching Among The Lights Of 27th And Welton In The Denver Colored Section, Wishing I Were A Negro, Feeling That The Best The White World Had Offered Was Not Enough Ecstasy For Me, Not Enough Life, Joy, Kicks, Darkness, Music, Not Enough Night.

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

One Man Practicing Kindness In The Wilderness Is Worth All The Temples This World Pulls.

I Ate Apple Pie And Ice Cream—it Was Getting Better As I Got Deeper Into Iowa, The Pie Bigger, The Ice Cream Richer. There Were The Most Beautiful Bevies Of Girls Everywhere I Looked In Des Moines That Afternoon—they Were Coming Home From High School—but I Had No Time For Thoughts Like That…so I Rushed Past The Pretty Girls, And The Prettiest Girls In The World Live In Des Moines.

This Was A Manuscript Of The Night We Couldn’t Read.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'd Better Be A Poet Or Lay Down Dead.

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

-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.

Rest And Be Kind, You Don't Have To Prove Anything

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.

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.

If You Tell A True Story, You Can't Be Wrong.

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

The Human Bones Are But Vain Lines Dawdling, The Whole Universe A Blank Mold Of Stars.

What's Your Road, Man? - Holyboy Road, Madman Road, Rainbow Road, Guppy Road, Any Road. It's An Anywhere Road For Anybody Anyhow. Where Body How?

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

Books, Shmooks, This Sickness Has Got Me Wishing If I Can Ever Get Out Of This I'll Gladly Become A Millworker And Shut My Big Mouth.

The Bartenders Are The Regular Band Of Jack, And The Heavenly Drummer Who Looks Up To The Sky With Blue Eyes, With A Beard, Is Wailing Beer-caps Of Bottles And Jamming On The Cash Register And Everything Is Going To The Beat - It's The Beat Generation, Its Béat, It's The Beat To Keep, It's The Beat Of The Heart, It's Being Beat And Down In The World And Like Oldtime Lowdown.

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George McGovern

Virginia C. Andrews

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