I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.

I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.

It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.