"In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentinent debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind." (223, On the Road)
"Dean took out other pictures. I realized that these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance." (231, On the Road)
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all the road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening that must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and fold the final shore in, and nobody, nobody know what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." (281, On the Road)
It doesn't matter how the damn thing begins, or the failings you suffer in between; you better know how to end it off. This is the advice Kerouac imparts to me. On the Road took me to a place now lost, possibly for all time. It is a land unchained; fresh, raw, and still unsure of its own capacities. It was the land of possibility, the land of opportunity, the land where life resided, wild and uncouth, laying barechested on the steel top of a 1937 Ford, the land of eternal youth, if only eternal for a moment. Now, as I approach my twenty-fifth year, I am burdened with lamentations about lost opportunities and squandered youth. I stare despondently at the distance to come, well aware that every day may be as colourless as the last. But I can go on, as long as the possibility of life still exists. With possibilities somewhere out there for me to woo, I must go on.
