“My hosts have spread the spectrum: students, farm and construction workers, salesmen and truck drivers, teaches and writers... I've stayed in homes with backyard swimming pools and homes with backyard toilets, ridden with people who needed gas money and others who bought me meals, some who would put the fear of God into me, who whose country-twand talk almost called for an interpreter... but one thing had they in common: the willingness to help a stranger on the road or a weary friend at their door”

“Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.”

“People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards--and they are always and everywhere in the majority--treat Herodotus' sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even.”

“The only trouble was, I wasn't with a group of my peers. Who are my peers? [...] And there I was with a dismal coven of repentant soaks -- a car salesman who had fallen from the creed of the Kiwanis, an Jewish woman whose family misunderstood her attempts to put them straight on everything, a couple of schoolteachers who can't ever have taught anything except Civics, and some business men whose god was Mammon, and a truck-driver who was included, I gather, to keep our eyes on the road and our discussions hitched to reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine. So the imp of perversity prompted me to make pretty patterns of our discussions together, and screw the poor boozers up worse then they'd been screwed up before. For the first time in years, I was having a really good time.”

“So, now I've been to see a drug counselor who told me I need to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.”

“And I like those authors best whose scenes describe my own situation in life-- and the friends who are about me whose stories touch me with interest, from resembling my own homely existence.”