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His heart was beating against his ribs so hard he thought it might burst, and hoped it would; or that the arteries of his brain would pop and bring him a quicker death than starving, day by day, amid the scorpions and fleas—for fleas were one of the worst torments of the pit.

The one weapon Scull had left to him was his hatred -- always, throughout his life, hatred had come easier to him than love. The Christian view that one should love his brethren struck him as absurd.

No intelligent man would walk the earth long without realizing that there were many gods to fear. There was a god in the sun and in the floor, a god in the ice and in the lightning, not to mention the many gods who took their nature from animals: the bear god, the lizard god, and so on. The old ones believed that when eagles screamed they were calling out the name of the eagle god.

It'd be better if fancy iterators re-fancied their anvil on a wit. [A not atypical jazzy riff by Kerouac]

Doctor Sax was everywhere in this—his glee supported us and made us run and jump and grab leaves and roll in the grass when we went home—Doctor Sax gets into the blood of children by his cape...his laughter is hidden in the black hoods of the darkness where you can suck him up with air, the glee of night in kids is a message from the dark....

"It's the right time for a tune," Snufkin thought. A new tune, one part expectation, two parts spring sadness, and for the rest the great delight of walking alone and liking it.

One can own, either rightfully or fruitfully, only those things—and only so much of a thing—as one can come into some intimate relationship with. One cannot really own any land to which one does not in turn belong, and what is true of land is true of everything else. One can own only what one loves, and love is always some kind of reciprocal relationship.

Anna stayed at the window in irresolute anxiety. Maybe a cup of coffee would be nice ... but suddenly she didn't want one. It was a small but definite insight. She didn't like coffee. In fact, she never had.

With every advance from the known to the unknown, the mystery deepens.

You cannot write more than a dozen love-letters without finding yourself gravelled for fresh matter. The richest of human experiences is also the most limited in its range of expression. Words kill love as they kill everything else.

Call rarely even spent up his wages in the course of a month, whereas Gus never failed to spend his to the last penny, or perhaps even a few dollars beyond the last penny. Something always tempted him: if it wasn't just a pretty whore it might be a new six-shooter, a fine vest, or even just a better grade of whiskey.

There is a clutter to life that ideas can never tolerate or make go away. To unravel something, you have to have a thesis. But to understand the dead ends, back alleys, and side roads of life itself, you have to mistrust your thesis and constantly keep an eye on it lest it blind you to detail, contradiction, lust, love, and loneliness.

He hadn't wanted to come here. He'd wanted it less and less as the bus traveled further across the wasteland; miles of nothing, just land, empty land. Land that didn't get anywhere except into more land, and always against the sky, the unmoving barrier of mountains. It was like moving into a trap.

Uzbekistan was no green Persia with a history of scholarly warrior-kings, not some Mediterranean paradise where the roses of Hellenism bloomed. This was desert followed by desert alongside desert surrounded by desert. By horse or on foot, one would have had to travel quite a while in ancient times to see anything but bleakness....

There Hayidar's BMW waited, a tiger tail of exhaust flickering behind it. Hayidar's driver, Maruf, remembered me on sight and struggled out of the car in the manner of a gut-shot grizzly. His apparent reason for doing so was the ceremonial rupture of my rib cage.

I once worked alongside someone who by her own admission knew next to nothing about literature. She once asked me to recommend a book by Graham Greene. 'Why don't you try The End of the Affair?' I suggested. 'What, just the end? Not the whole thing?' she replied.

All space is now temporary as the vise grip of our appetites tightens against it.

Juvencio. Fashioner of phantoms. You left yours—alive and piercing, who accompanied you since childhood—encrusted in the niches of urban asphalt. And now you've got new ghosts swaying on the line fences of your insomnia. You carry a dizzy whirl about a team of them. Are they alive or dead? Do they exist or are you creating them on your own springboard of dreams?

On the night of the Quindales it was raining lust over the sea and over the jungle. Multimillions of zoomorphic eyes were weaving metaphors of phosphorus. Fastened on the sepia-green nerves, they sensed the coming. Was he really the representative of Longtail? Inside the saurian skin—an apocalyptic crocodile—The Spiteful One was bleeding arteries.

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.

Nothing is as horrifying as fishing corpses from the Seine as they drift with the current on the way to better days in another universe. Mistreated and misunderstood kids, girls knocked up and abandoned, the unemployed and maladapted, the nutcases and the obsessed—all those beloved character-types of popular novels whose contemplation attracts rubbernecking readers like so many scatophagic insects

'This is an awful town,' thought Peredonov, 'and the people here are evil and nasty. I must leave here and go to another town as soon as possible, a town where all the teachers will bow down low to me, and where all the students will be afraid and whisper in fear: "The inspector is coming." Yes, the authorities have a completely different life in this world.'

Peredonov looked on indifferently: he took no interest in other people's affairs. He disliked people and did not think about them except in connection with his own benefit and pleasures.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet.

We voted in fifth-grade physics that half a pound of feathers weighed more than half a pound of steel. We were adamant. Knowledge itself was a democracy.

Every damned little narrow-dowped rat that you met put on the English if he thought he'd impress you—as though Scotch wasn't good enough now, it had words that the thin bit scraichs of the English could never come at. You can tell me what's the English for sotter or greip or smore or pleiter, gloaming or glunching or well-kenspeckled?

Andy was a meikle slummock of a creature, and his mouth was aye open, and he dribbled like a teething foal, and his nose wabbled all over his face and when he tried to speak it was a fair jumble of foolishness.

However, as has often been observed, though Mephistopheles uses every means to oppose the Flux of life, he stimulates Life. He fights against the Good but ends by being Good. This demon who denies Life is all the same a collaborator with God. This is why God, with his divine foresight, willingly gives him to man as a companion.

The true intellectual is equal to such questions. Having never so much as glanced at a factory in his life, he commits himself to the Intourist Travel Agency, spends three weeks gaping at belt-conveyors invented in Detroit, and returns to proclaim the dawn of human happiness. Meanwhile his opposite, the die-hard, sits at home brooding madly over bugs in the butter.