Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand.

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.

Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.