Quotes from The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac

"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."

"Wa? Where am I, what is the basketballly game of eternity the girls are playing here by me in the old house of my life, the house isn't on fire is it?"

"Ah poor mind of man, and lonely man alone on the beach, and God watching with intent smile I'd say...."

"it was so pure, fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean."

"'now morning I face my lone shadow, I can't study with both eyes full of tears.'"

"...my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. 'Pretty girls make graves,'..."

"'...when I was a little kid in Oregan I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grevious domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.'"

"...the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary. And if you don't believe me come back in a billion years and deny it. For what is time?"

"'...do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life?' 'Yes, that's all I want...'"

"'All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you you'll deserve it too, I'll say.'"

"--colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in teh wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderfless crapulous civilization.[...]'they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears int eh mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.'"

"'...that don't mean I don't love America, by God, though I hate these damn hunters, all they wanta do is level a gun at a helpless sentient being and murder it, for every sentient being or living creature these actual pricks kill they will be reborn a thousand times to suffer the horrors of samsara and damn good for 'em too.'"

"'The milk around here must be fine but more cows than people.[...]The fast kids around here must go thirty-four miles.'"

"...and the stars were icicles of mockery."

"'Comparisons are odious'...'It don't make a damn frigging difference whether you're in The Place or hiking up Matterhorn, it's all the same old void, boy'"

"'Oh this is like an early morning in China and I'm five years old in beginningless time!'"

"Walking in this country you could understand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had written, never getting drunk in the mountains or anything but just going along as fresh as children writing down what they saw without literary devices or fanciness of expression."