When all of the family was stilled in sleep, when the streetlamp a few paces from the house shone at night and made grotesque shadows of the trees upon the house, when the river sighed off into the da...
We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.
We just think that we're being born, when we're born; (headfirst crying out of the smile of the womb, if we'd only known that it was all the same before getting involved in Samsara---saving motion and...
Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along i...
This can't go on all the time- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.
Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under t...
The silence was an intense roar.
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 p...
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.
The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.
The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
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 Indianapo...
The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It’s a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows...
She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved not...
Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
Out on the road outside Cheyenne Wells a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alco...
My witness is the empty sky. My reward is the perfect blue sky at dawn in the desert in a bird-resounding riverbottom grove.
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 cl...
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.