Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'...But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.'There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!

...in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess" (p. 113)

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk

Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

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

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.