It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

…of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth.

Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back.

I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long.On Starvation Ridgelittle sticksAre trying to grow.

I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.

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

When you write letters to me, try not to be sophomoric and moribund about your criticisms of Jean et son weltanschauung [and his worldview.] A little more finesse, please, or if possible, a dash of humor.