One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe – fear and awe of the State.
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying – a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.
Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.
Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama’s lap from alcohol and infantilism.
A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
It’s a fool’s life, a rogue’s life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.
A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone and to no one.
Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness.
High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.
Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.
I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.