"Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone."
— Jack Kerouac (Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956)

"he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end."
— Jack Kerouac

"'It'll take you eternities to get rid of me,' she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I'll never get rid of her - I wanta be chased till eternity till I catch her."
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

"What is the feeling when you re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing it s the too huge world vaulting us and it s good bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."
— T.S. Eliot

"We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
— T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party)

"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow"
— T.S. Eliot

"...you look at me like an emergency"
— Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972)

"and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other."
— Adrienne Rich