I wonder why our life must quiver between beauty and guilt, consummation and sadness, desire and regret, immortality and tattered moments unknowable, truth and beautiful meaningful lies.
He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. ‘Look’, he said. ‘You’re a fish in a pond. It’s drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything’s going to be all right.
I’m back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it’s my one and only world, and I’ll do the best I can.
Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?
But no matter, the road is life.
I looked up at the sky; the pure, wonderful stars were still there, burning.
It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.
As for his hobby, drawing, he was better at that than most artists alive today and I always knew he was really a great young artist pretending to be withdrawn so people would leave him alone, also so people wouldn’t ask him to get a job.
He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.
Some people have vibrations that come straight from the vibrating heart of the sun, unjaded...
There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you’d be scared and couldn’t comprehend and you’d despair so much you’d drop dead,′ that’s what he just about said in one of those sutras – -.
It was a joy, though, to get down into the valley and lose sight of all that open sky space underneath everything and finally, as it got graying five o’clocking, about a hundred yards from the other boys and walking alone, to just pick my way singing and thinking along the little black cruds of a deer trail through the rocks, no call to think or look ahead or worry, just follow the little balls of deer crud with your eyes cast down and enjoy life.
I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery.
If all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights?
The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It’s a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don’t exist to its satisfaction.
If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adiron dacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever – think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.
All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on.
And all you hearts who love life realize now that to love is to love-.
I’m a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I’m a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss – I am made of Cody, too -.
God who is everything possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream of an impossible task.