Great Throughts Treasury

"Hope is a word like a snowdrift - This is the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness - So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry."

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

"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."

"We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born."

"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. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect."

"Belief and Technique for Modern Prose: 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven "

"I didn?t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddamit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being."

"I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!""

"There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!"

"A choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night."

"When you die you die, that's it - he replied."

"A feeling of sadness that only bus stations have."

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

"A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be."

"A fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this."

"A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

"A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."

"A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."

"A pain pierced my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl that I liked to go in the direction opposite to mine in this world great too."

"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest."

"A sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth."

"A traveling epic Hunkey, crossing and re-crossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer and only because he has no place he can stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, and keep rolling under the stars"

"A world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures..."

"After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to 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."

"Accept loss forever"

"Ah the mad hearts of all of us."

"Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing."

"After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him."

"Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain."

"Ah, holy hole!"

"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."

"Ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you."

"All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road."

"All around me were the noise of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john."

"All day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head."

"all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country."

"All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh."

"All my other current friends were intellectuals??Chad the Nietzschean anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealizt low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-everything drawl??or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker. But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his criminality was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming. 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; he didn't care one way or the other."

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

"All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch and Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers."

"All of life is a foreign country."

"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land."

"All life is but a skull-bone and a rack of ribs through which we keep passing food and fuel- just so's we can burn so furious beautiful."

"All that hitchhiking. All that railroadin. All that comin back to America."

"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."

"All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of hats, just like after work in any town anywhere."

"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."

"All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile."

"All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you"

"America is a lonely crock of shit."