Confederate General From Big Sur Quotes

The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.

This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.

Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.

We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.

The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass

She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.

One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do… seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.

It's all right," she said. "It's all right." That was really a very nice sound. There should be a bird that does that: that sings when you are impotent.

It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco. "Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!" "I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept.

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.' 'Yeah,' I said. Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said. 'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said. I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank. There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line. It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck. We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know.

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

GROWL!--opp/opp/opp/opp/opp/opp/opp/opp!" the alligator said with the pork chop sticking out of his mouth. Nothing Elizabeth's alligator said profoundly, for meek alligators shall inherit the earth.

The fact that she had large firm breasts and was a Democrat made her the perfect woman for me.

— Чому ти не взяв ліхтаря? — спитала Елейн. — Не хочу, аби хтось знав, що ми тут. — Ми не тут, — сказала вона

She looked so old that she reminded me of a comic book hero of my childhood: The Heap. It was a World War I German pilot who was shot down and lay wounded for months in a bog and was slowly changed by mysterious juices into a ⅞ plant and ⅛ human thing. The Heap walked around like a mound of moldy hay and performed good deeds, and of course bullets had no effect on it. The Heap killed the comic book villains by giving them a great big hug, then instead of riding classically away into the sunset like a Western, The Heap lumbered off into the bog. That’s the way the old woman looked.