"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..."
"Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict."
"Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back."
"Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!"
"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."
"We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco."
"because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars..."
"...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing."
"It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time."
"I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air you can kiss - and palms."
"He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there."
"We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301)."
"There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go."
"I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go."
"And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all."
"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."
"He had become completely mad in his movements; He seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying 'Am,' and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking"
"...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad."
"And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco."
"I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief."
"At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will."
"I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars."
"It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night."
"I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion"