Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.

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

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.

I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.

Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.