I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to New York.
I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.
Late afternoon, it was I not the void that changed.
Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by.
Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour... this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?
He was BEAT – the root, the soul of Beatific.
You boys going to get somewhere, or just going.
Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon...
Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.
What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.
New Orleans is a very dull town. It’s against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary.
The grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American Night.
A little weariness’ll change a lot of things.
The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down.
Pain or love or danger makes you real again, ain’t that right.
There is a kind of dreary monotony about there characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull.
To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call “do-nothing.
Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.
Buddhism wasn’t responsible for the insane atrocities of human history.
Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother – I loved Tyke with all my heart.