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.
All the way down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.
Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions about charity, for charity after all is just a word.
He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing.
We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston – red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.
He began to learn “Yes!” to everything, just like Dean at this time, and hasn’t stopped since.
Everything’ll be all right, desolation is desolation everywhere and desolation is all we got and desolation aint so bad.
He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
We live to long, so long I will, and jounce down that mountain highest perfect knowing or no highest perfect knowing full of glorious ignorant looking to sparkle elsewhere-.