“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”

“you know when i was a little kid in oregon i didn't feel that i was and american at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when i discovered buddhism and all i suddenly felt that i had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of the faults and sins in that lifetime i was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in america where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”

“…the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside?”

“Texas is undeniable...We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest.”

“I wanted to put my hand to an enormous paean which would unify my vision of America with words spilled out in the modern spontaneous method. Instead of just a horizontal account of travels on the road, I wanted a vertical, metaphysical study. ... This feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri.”

“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”