Cassady Quotes & Sayings

I remember being unusually pensive that May evening, perhaps it was the heat of Spring's first warm day which, encountering my thick winter blood, forced a dilution upward into a brain weary of straining the last six months to overcome freezing and the long absent thinning of blood stirred a weakening desire for the softer things, a nostalgia, yet a death, a precognition, if you will... — Neal Cassady

Each day I lacerated myself thinking on her, but I didn't go back. — Neal Cassady

I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica of childhood. — Neal Cassady

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other. — Neal Cassady

It's not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say "I'm authentic," they're not evoking the shade of Neal Cassady. (102) — Geoffrey Nunberg

And so love goes. And so life goes. And so I go. — Neal Cassady

I see no greatness in my self ... I'm a simple-minded, child-like, insipid sort of moronic and kind of akward feeling adolescent. — Neal Cassady

Billboards, billboards, drink this, eat that, use all manner of things, everyone, the best, the cheapest, the purest and most satisfying of all their available counterparts. Red lights flicker on every horizon, airplanes beware; cars flash by, more lights. Workers repair the gas main. Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets. — Neal Cassady

Some events are in the area of the soul where words cannot penetrate. — Neal Cassady

I became the unnatural son of a few score of beaten men. — Neal Cassady

Sometimes I sits and thinks. Other times I sits and drinks, but mostly I just sits. — Neal Cassady

The time has come, everybody lie down so you won't get hurt when the sun bursts. — Neal Cassady

We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world! — Neal Cassady

My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me. — Neal Cassady

When you got back to his apartment, the flamenco dancers were still stomping around in the restaurant upstairs. Moriarity pushed a bottle of cheap Sauterne and sliced salami across the kitchen table. A large cockroach fell from the top of the refrigerator and landed with a click on the scarred linoleum floor. You lifted both your feet and curled your toes. — Lorena Cassady

I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters. — Jack Kerouac

I met Rob in Austin, Texas. He was hitchhiking to California and I was driving to California, so it seemed like a perfect match. He had long blond hair and blue eyes and golden skin and so did I. It was like falling in love with myself. — Lorena Cassady

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. — Thom Gunn