“...and we wandered through the casino gawking. It was kind of how I picture hell to be, with big dim rooms and hundreds of people packed in, and they're all working very hard but not getting anything done, and there's a constant racket of dingers going off, and sirens.”

“Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.”

“How big are muffins going to get before we all join hands across America? Have you seen them? They're huge. "Yeah, I'll take a coffee and... Oh, my God! Yeah, I'll have the beanbag chair with raisins.”

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”

“I was so scared it was all going to be gone by the time I got there. Ninth grade, tenth grade - can't this thing go any faster?In the magazine, there were funny people with funny names like John Sex, who had wild white hair and a snake!-and didn't that just open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities?And how long the years are-endless! And the minutae of your daily life! So tedious, when there are BIG THINGS happening a thousand miles away. And when you go to bed at night, it's hard to believe those people, those fabulous, daunting people, are out there right now!So we wait, and we endure, and someday we will be there, and we will make it.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don't know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven't seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you'd have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day-- and this is what is hard to explain--you see people like you never saw them before.”