Sal Paradise Quotes

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise

And I realize I've been betrayed by the two vices that fiction promised me I'd adore. Sal Paradise held up bottles of booze like a housewife in a detergent commercial. Holden Caulfield reached for his cigarettes like an act of faith. Even Huckleberry Finn tapped on his pipe with relief and satisfaction. If sex turns out to be this bad, I'm never reading again.

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read" - Sal Paradise, On The Road

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read" - Sal Paradise

Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.

In Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just call me Sal. I’ve been on a ride with Augustine. Here’s what I’ve seen; here’s what he’s shown me (about myself); here’s why you might consider coming along.

Afterwards he spoke to her in the dark. “I don’t know, Mave. I just don’t know.” Should she say, What? What you mean? What don’t you know? Or keep quiet? Mavis chose silence because suddenly she understood that he was talking not to her but to the other children, snickering behind the door. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we can fix it. Maybe not. I just don’t know.” He let out a deep yawn, then, “Don’t see how, though.” It was, she knew, the signal—to Sal, to Frankie, to Billy James.