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“By God, you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of a triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it.”
“"Pray tell us, good buddy, and don't make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean, this Eternal Scene, just what's the point, of this whole joint?" I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums.”
“Japhy, do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”
“I got him off talking about his trouble to talk about the Last Things and he said, "Yeah, those who're good stay in Heaven, they've been in Heaven from the beginning," which was very wise.”
“It was the realer-than-life Japhy of my dreams, and he stood there saying nothing. "Go away, thieves of the mind!" he cried down the hollows of the unbelievable Cascades.”
“Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s.