On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The on-the-move outsider nation of On the Road dramatizes Kerouac’s strong belief that this elemental American idealism, this faith in a place at the end of the road where you could make both a home and a stand had, in Holmes’s words, “been outlawed to the margins of American life in his time. His most persistent desire in those days was to chronic

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.

Neal came right out to Ozone Park where I was living with my mother, and one night while I was working on my book or my painting or whatever you want to call it there was a knock on the door and there was Neal, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying “Hel-lo, you remember me, Neal Cassady? I’ve come to ask you to show me

“Yes of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact those problems have occurred to me but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer’s dichotomy for any inwardly realized…” and on and on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn’t, and what I mean is, in those days he

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

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.

“Come on man, those girls won’t wait, make it fast,” and I said “Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,” and I did and it was one of the best chapters in the whole book. Then I dressed and off we flew to NY to meet some girls.

There were plenty of queers however. Several times I went to Sanfran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a barjohn I took out the gun and said “Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?” They bolted. I’ve never understood why I did that, I knew queers all over the country.

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.