No class until 3:00? Might as well update my compilation of favorite quotes from On the Road. Although I have mixed feelings on the book as a whole, I did really appreciate certain passages that I read.
"But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" pg. 5-6
"And his 'criminality' was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was western, the west wind, and ode from the plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joyrides)" pg. 7 YES
"'Let's all go to my apartment!' I shouted. We did; the moment the car stopped there I jumped out and stood on ym head in the grass. All my keys fell out; I never found them. We ran, shouting, into the building. Roland Major stood barring our way in his silk dressing gown." pg. 44
"They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising the form underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining." pg. 54
"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious." pg. 54
"We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad." pg. 58
"There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is while like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then." pg. 79 My thoughts on the new establishments of the West and the lack of significance they portray
"LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets. LA is a jungle." pg. 86 Theory of commonality causing community? And direct correlation to previous quote.
"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."
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