“Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”

“Tell me what you'll do if you're captured by the coyotes... Well, that might work, but does your mother live near here?”

“ "I'm alive. You're alive. I gotta work to live so I do that and I'll have to do that for a long lime. But when I'm not workin', I'm livin'. So let's ride."”

“Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I'll feel most at ease.”

“well, i don't know about you but I'm going to try everything! War, women, travel, marriage, children, the works. [...]. I want to know about things, what makes them work!”

“I was going to rise, do some typing and coffee drinking in the kitchen all day since at that time work, work was my dominant thought, not love- not the pain which impels me to write this even while I don't want to, the pain which won't be eased by writing of this but heightened, but which will be redeemed, and if only it were a dignified pain and could be placed somewhere other than this black gutter of shame and loss and noisemaking folly in the night... /The Subterraneans”