John Clellon Holmes Quotes & Sayings

Nothing like the road to rub all the sand out of your soul. — John Clellon Holmes

For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. — John Clellon Holmes

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. — John Clellon Holmes

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

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. — John Clellon Holmes

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

...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. — John Clellon Holmes

They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. — John Clellon Holmes

He'd been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that's how long - the Big River - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered. — John Clellon Holmes

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. — 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. — John Clellon Holmes

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