Quotes from book

The Dharma Bums

“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach….”

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

“To the children and the innocent it's all the same.”

“Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?”

“Pretty girls make graves.”

“Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

“It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.”

“I think it's a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.”

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

“The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L. A.”

“That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.”

“The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”

“It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.”

“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

“… do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”

“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”

“Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.”