On The Road by Jack Kerouac
(4) [On Dean] He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life
It was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy
(5) "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
…What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off
(16) I kind of liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because he was enthusiastic about things
(42) Carlo and I went through the rickets streets in the Denver night. The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream
(48) And I said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all."
(57) "What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls
"I don't know, just wait on tables and try to get along," she yawned.
I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together
(58) Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious
(81) A pain stabbed at my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world
(83) I looked greedily out the window; stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America
(91) …But 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 goodbye
(101) [Saying goodbye to Terry] We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time
(117) I couldn't meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make?
I want to marry a girl so I can rest my soul with her 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
(121) And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief
(125) …Besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion
(127) [On Rollo Greb] He didn't give a damn about anything…His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light
He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life
(143) [On old Bull Lee] He spent all his time learning…"the facts of life", which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to
[Long list of travels/adventures] He did all these things merely for the experience
(146) [Bill] The ideal bar doesn't exist in America…In nineteen ten a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work…Now bars are a mess/past their prime (**absurdity of nostalgia**)
(147) 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
(172) It seemed I had a whole host of memories leading back to 1750 in England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body
(173) And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy what I always wanted to reach…[paragraph of realization]…I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment
(184) [Dean]: The second day everything came to me, EVERYTHING I'd ever done or known or read or heard of or conjectured came back to me and rearranged itself in my mind in a brand-new logical way
And because I could think of nothing else in the interior concerns of holding and catering to the amazement and gratitude I felt, I kept saying, "Yes, yes, yes, yes" real quiet, and these green tea visions lasted until the third day
(187) We know life, Sal, we're growing older, each of us, little by little, and are coming to know things
(195) [On Dean] He was BEAT -- the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do
Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast this fair night? I recoiled from the thought
Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness -- everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being
"The sooner he's dead the better," said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room
"Very well then," I said, "but he's alive and I'll bet you want to know what he does next and that's because he's got the secret that we're all busting to find and it's splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don't worry, it won't be your fault but the fault of God"
(202) Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, good-bye
(205) Mission Street that last day in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes coming home from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America's most excited city
With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it
(207) [Dean] Now, man, that alto man last night had IT -- he held it once he found it; I've never seen a guy who could hold so long
I wanted to know what "IT" meant. "Ah well" -- Dean laughed -- "now you're asking me impon-de-rables--ahem!"
"All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets--everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing
"He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT --". Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it
[Sal: I never talked so much in my life.] We were telling these things and both sweating. We had completely forgotten the people up front
The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank transcendence of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives
"Oh man! Man! Man!" moaned Dean. "…Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although in matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE."
Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there -- and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is you, you see, unhappiness…"
"And all the time it all flies by them, and they know it and that too worries them to no end. Listen! Listen! 'Well now, I don't know -- maybe we shouldn't get has in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't ,know, well I just don't feel like it anyway…' Man, you dig all this."
Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! In the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning too
(212) "Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it! People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. EE! Look!"
He was so excited it made me cry
(228) The Jesuit boys giggled. They were full of corny quips and Eastern college talk and had nothing on their bird-beans except a lot of ill-understood Aquinas for stuffing for their pepper
Dean and I paid absolutely no attention to them
The kind of utter darkness that falls on a prairie like that is inconceivable to an Easterner
(229) She was a well-built blonde but like all women who live in the wide spaces she complained a little of the boredom
*My note: They watched no TV in their entire lifetime. Zero.*
(244) [Girl on the bus] "And what else do you do for fun?" I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done -- whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.
"What do you want out of life?" I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother's for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear
"What is your brother aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?"
She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost
(246) What difference does it make after all? Anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? What's earth? All in the mind
(253) [Dean took out more pictures] I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road
All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness
(276) "It's the world," said Dean. "My God!" he cried, slapping the wheel. "It's the world!" We can go right to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!" We rushed on.
(297) [Dean on Mexican villagers "born and living on the ledge] "What that must do to their souls! How different they must be in their private concerns and evaluations and wishes!"
Dean drove on with his mouth hanging in awe, ten miles an hour, desirous to see every possible human being on the road. We climbed and climbed.
(301) [Sal's thoughts while having dysentery] I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my flesh, and I had all the dreams.
(306) [Camille's letter to Dean] "Dear Dean, it's the end of the first half of the century. Welcome with love and kisses to spend the other half with us. We all wait for you."
So Dean's life was settled with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille, and I thanked God for him
(307) So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
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