The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
Will you love me in December as you do in May?
This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.
All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.
The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.
It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.
Cats yawn because they realize that there's nothing to do.
I think it's all lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.
We agreed to love each other madly.
I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.
And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.
In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood
And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
-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.
Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.
You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.
I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: