Great Throughts Treasury

"Dammit that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I wish I'd a had a tape recorder to take it down.' 'Those things aren't made to be heard by the people below,' says Japhy dead serious. 'By God you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of the triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it. But when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain I suddenly understood everything."

"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."

"Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo 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, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness."

"Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation."

"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."

"Dean, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I'd told everything about Dean, began almost to cry."

"Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?"

"Diamond Sutra says, 'Make no formed conceptions about the realness of existence nor about the unrealness of existence, or words like that. Handcuffs will get soft and Billy clubs will topple over, let's go on being free anyhow."

"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 cramp 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..."

"Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning?"

"Difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big sole details about others go sitting and waiting around."

"Do not use the phone, people are ever ready to respond. Use poetry."

"Do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean."

"Don?t you have a class this morning, Georgie? Day mumbled something that sounded like Ancient History of the Near East and Greece. Poof! scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork, Come with me and see the Near East."

"Does this mean that frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?"

"Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?"

"Don't touch me, I'm full of snakes."

"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."

"Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that."

"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."

"Don't stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work."

"Down in Denver, all I did was die."

"Dreaming: the phantom of self-illusion emanating visions that change every night. Living: the phantom of universal self-illusion emanating the huge vision of the world that takes millenniums to change"

"Dreams were so irrational, so gray with a nameless terror . . . and yet, too, so haunting and beautiful."

"Eager for bread and love."

"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 up at each other for the last time."

"Equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha ."

"Every night I continue to ask the Lord, Why? And I have not had a decent answer."

"Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies."

"Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the word and would raise mean's souls to joy."

"Everything is all right forever and forever and forever."

"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."

"Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' ? Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' ? The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' ? Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the same.'"

"Everything belongs to me because I am poor."

"Everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, 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 and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat."

"Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive. It was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond empty space blue. The mountains are mighty patient, Buddha-man, I said out loud, and took a drink."

"Fact that you die, everything you do Hoalmut. However you live, yes you are alive - and this is not a lie from Harvard."

"Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips."

"Fear life but don't die, you?re alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt."

"February dawn ? frost on the path where I paced all winter."

"FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings."

"Finding Nirvana is like locating silence."

"Five thousand university-trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904, or one night?s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: He was simply born to do it. On the other hand, if the five thousand ?trained? writers, plus Joyce, all put their hands to a Reader?s Digest-type article about ?Vacation Hints? or ?Homemaker?s Tips,? even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight."

"For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me to pay attention to his goodness and advice."

"Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do."

"Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser."

"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."

"For the next week that was all I heard - manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven."

"Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they?re seeing now, what we?ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers."

"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."