galatea was a serious girl. she was pale and looked like tears all over. big ed passed his hand through his hair and said hello. she looked at him steadily. "where have you been? why did you do this to me?" and she gave dean a dirty look; she knew the score. dean paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food; he asked jane if there was anything. the confusion began right there.

I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely phsycial realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.