It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say ‘amen.’
Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!
The world is always dying and always coming back to life. Tide and pulse, and with the turn of the tide a touch of mystery.
Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.
I know what the great cure is: to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.
You can’t make people joyous just by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn’t. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
The one thing I have insisted on with all of my friends, regardless of class or station in life, is to be able to speak truthfully. If I cannot be open and frank with a friend, or he with me, I drop him.
Artists never thrive in colonies.
What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.
Nothing is more obscene than inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis.
I had moment of ecstasy and I sang with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her red-feathered legs and the islands dropping out of sight. But nobody heard.
You see, people read to be amused, to pass the time, I never read to be instructed; I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic. I’m always looking for the author who can take me out of myself.
Dostoyevsky was the sum of all these contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him to the heights.
Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance, but a dance!
A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.
I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it.
No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out that the American Indian; no land was ever raped in a bloody and foul way than California was by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins – our hands are steeped in blood and crime.
Kafka’s long nightmares were but a preparation for the actual horrors we were to experience even to a greater degree.
A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.
In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow.