While leaning over the toilet getting up his nerve, he thought that the moment before making yourself throw up must be very like the instant before suicide. You are almost content to bear the sickening headache and the torment in your stomach rather than go through that moment. But the prospect of relief made you foolhardy and you jammed your finger down your throat.

Some books accrete things to themselves like a magnet. The writer risks sterility by subjecting the mysterious power of imagination to the devices of mere comprehension.

Nothing like the road to rub all the sand out of your soul.

The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.

They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.

...unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take.

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them.