Best 11 quotes of John Clellon Holmes on MyQuotes

John Clellon Holmes

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    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.

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    John Clellon Holmes

    Certain kinds of clichés are the narcotics of the middle class.

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    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.

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    John Clellon Holmes

    Nothing like the road to rub all the sand out of your soul.

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    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.

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    John Clellon Holmes

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

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    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.

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    John Clellon Holmes

    For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them.

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    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.

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    John Clellon Holmes

    They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.

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    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.