"Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, 'Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.'”
- Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody

"I can't help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can't help it. I'm tired. I'm give out trying. You got chances. I had so many insults I was born dead. You got it easy. I was born dead an' life was hard. I'm tired. I'm tired out talking and standing up. I been dead fifty-five years.
- Pete Bancini, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

"All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down."
- Randle McMurphy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

"They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There's no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you..."
- Junkie by William Burroughs

"When you stop growing you start dying."
- Junkie by William Burroughs

"Deliver us from the clichés that have locked up even these so-called experimenter's brains."
- Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test