excerpts from "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

"The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences."

"The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yearn or say a commonplace thing...but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night."

"What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?"

"Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for Love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."

"He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence."

"And as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was one." Sal Paradise


n'm'out