Central City is two miles high; at first you get drunk on the altitude, then you get tired, and there’s a fever in your soul.

Her brother was a wildbuck Mexican hotcat with a hunger for booze, a great good kid.

“See that toe?” he said as he gunned the heap to eighty and passed everybody on the road. “Look at it.” It was swathed in bandages. “I just had it amputated this morning. The bastards wanted me to stay in the hospital. I packed my bag and left. What’s a toe.”

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

Neal had apparently dispatched him to the kitchen, probably to make coffee while he proceeded with his loveproblems…. for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living, and so on.

What a hang up I got into at once! As I look back on it it’s incredible that I could have been so damned dumb.

We went to New York, I forget what the situation was, two girls---there were no girls there, they were supposed to meet him or some such thing and they weren’t there.

the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.

This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink in the night.