I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.

He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.