The Dharma Bums: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jack Kerouac

These people must be assholes,” he added in sudden straight revelation.

“Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,”

all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume,

Who’s to say the cops of America and the Republicans and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?”

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas.

Everybody in Skid Row wants to be a millionaire.

After all a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls”

The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain’t this and that at all?

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.