My witness is the empty sky.

We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell

You guys are going somewhere or just going?

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else?

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.