Quotes from John Clellon Holmes

Jazz music hashaunted America for seventy years.It has tempted us out of our lily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeled joy.

Some books accrete things to themselves like a magnet. The writer risks sterility by subjecting the mysterious power of imagination to the devices of mere comprehension.

The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.

While leaning over the toilet getting up his nerve, he thought that the moment before making yourself throw up must be very like the instant before suicide. You are almost content to bear the sickening headache and the torment in your stomach rather than go through that moment. But the prospect of relief made you foolhardy and you jammed your finger down your throat.

A joy without object or reason rose within him, but like all such joys ebbed into frustration almost immediately because he did not know how to express it.

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.

For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them.

They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take.

debate in his troubled thoughts, however. Despite this, they

Letters] never failed to surprise and please him, because they reminded him that he existed in other people's thoughts.

simply telling the truth wasn't half enough. It still has to be brought to fictional life.

In this modern jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them, and their lives knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a music; it became an attitude toward life, a way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids (emotional outcasts of a war they had been too young to join, or in which they had lost their innocence), who had never belonged anywhere before, now felt somewhere at last.