Teddy

“You love your parents, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do – very much,” Teddy said, “but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean – I can tell.”
“All right. In what sense do you want to use it?"
Teddy thought it over. “You know what the word ‘affinity’ means?” he asked, turning to Nicholson.
“I have a rough idea,” Nicholson said dryly.
“I have a very strong affinity for them. They’re my parents, I mean, and we’re all part of each other’s harmony and everything,” Teddy said. “I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time… But they don’t love me and Booper – that’s my sister – that way. I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.”

Salinger, J.D. “Teddy”, Nine Stories. Little Brown and Company, New York, 1953. Page 187.

Jean-Marc

"J'ai un problème : je ne me souviens pas de mon enfance.

Tout ce que j'en ai retenu, c'est que la bourgeoisie ne fait pas le bonheur."

Beigbeder, Frédéric. Windows on the World. Grasset, Paris, 2003.

North

 "Somehow it seems the evil thing should take care itself, or be rectified in organic tree of things. But these deliberations ah-vail not my old Sprowf Bollnock – listen to me, Jacky, kid, boy that comes with me – though doubts and tears are roused up by the rain, wherein I know the rose is flowing, and it’s more natural I lay me down and make peace with bleak embattled eternity, in my rawer bed of dolors, with eyes of the night and soul shrouds, to keep my balanced fingers in – among the shades of arcade shafts, friends and fellow Evangelians of the Promised North – ever promised, ever-never yielding North shroud ghost of upper snow, rale of snowy singers wailing in the Arctic-speared, solitude night – I go and make my mention, I go and seek my tremble.”


Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Pages 218-219

Marbles

“(Go on outside, bad! Hitting your little sister on the head like that! You’ll never be happy being a man like that!)
Doubtful that I ever grew up, too. I’m worried.”

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 186

L-I-F-E

“  – Doctor Sax, whirl me no Shrouds – open up your heart and talk to me – in those days he was silent, sardonic, laughed in tall darkness.
    Now I hear him scream from the bed of the brim –
   “The Snake is Rising Inch an Hour to destroy us – yet you sit, you sit, you sit. Aïeee, the horrors of the East – make no fancy up-carves to the Ti-bet wall that a Kangaroo’s mule eared cousin – Frezels! Grawns! Wake to the test in your frails – Snake’s a Dirty Killer – Snake’s a Knife in the Safe – Snake’s a horror – only birds are good – murderous birds are good – murderous snakes, no good."
       Little booble-face laughs, plays in the street, knows no different – Yet my father warned me for years, it’s a dirty snaky deal with a fancy name – called L-I-F-E – more likely H-Y-P-E ... How rotten the walls of life do get – how collapsed the tendon beam ...”

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 77.

The Rail

“Bert Desjardins no less eccentric – playing he walked across the Moody Street Bridge with me the first morning I went to St. Joseph brothers school – the rail was on our left, iron, separating us from the 100-foot drop to the roaring foams of the rocks in their grisly eternity (that became white be-maned hysterical horses in the night) – he said “I remember my first day at school, I wasn’t tall enough to look over the thick bar of that rail, you’re going to grow just like I did right over it – in no time!” I couldn’t believe it.”

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 73.

Brown

"I’m in my mother’s arms but somehow the chair is not on the floor, it’s up in the air suspended in the voids of sawdust smelling mist blowing from Lajoie’s wood yard, suspended over yard of grass at corner of West Sixth and Boisvert – that daguerreotype gray is all over, but my mother’s robe sends auras of warm brown (the brown of my family) – so now when I bundle my chin in a warm scarf in a wet gale – I think on that comfort in the brown bathrobe – or as when a kitchen door is opened to winter allowing fresh ices of air to interfere with the warm billowy curtain of fragrant heat of cooking stove ... say a vanilla pudding ... I am the pudding, winter is the gray mist. A shudder of joy ran through me – when I read of Proust’s teacup – all those saucers in a crumb – all of History by thumb – all of a city in a tasty crumb – I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove. It’s exactly like cold milk on hot bread pudding, the melting of hot and cold is a hollow hole between memories of childhood."

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 19.

I was born.

"It was in Centralville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill - on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o'clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsiliy beers were tapped in Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ive over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun's lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac - I was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I cam hearing the river's red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation ... the snow was melting. The snake was coiled in the hill not in my heart."

Kerouac, Jack. Doctor Sax. Grove Press, New York, 1959. Page 17.