| | "I was adventuring in the crazy American night." |
| | "I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live..." |
| | "Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love;" |
| | "And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about." |
| | "I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future." |
| | "I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!'" |
| | "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." |
| | "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious." |
| | "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time." |
| | "I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it." |
| | "ife is life, and kind is kind" |
| | "We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of all time, move." |
| | "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." |
| | "...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." |
| | "He was BEAT—the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing?" |
| | "But no matter, the road is life." |
| | "Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there." |
| | "Here were the children of the American bop night." |
| | "Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy." |
| | "Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done," |
| | "What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind." |
| | "What's your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow." |
| | "Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate." |
| | "It came like a wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again." |
| | "We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest. Hotrods blew by. San Antonio, ah-haa!" |
| | "Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic." |
| | "They were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. ... And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth." |
| | "In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean's figure, and he looked like God." |
| | "And lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, "Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimmage on foot on the dark roads around America?" |
| | "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." |