Quotes from book

On the Road

“I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.”

“As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.”

“… most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.”

“She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.”

“We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.”

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night…”

“They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.”

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”

“Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.”

“I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.”

“For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.”

“Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…”

“You guys are going somewhere or just going?”

“When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!”

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.”

“Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.”

“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

“And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and we all know time!”