Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 137.

The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to its satisfaction.

It's disheartening that this is even more true now than it was fifty years ago. It's hardly considered out of the ordinary to keep video and audio surveillance in a vehicle, for use in the event of a run-in with the so-called law.

Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 127.

He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life -- two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life.

Jack Kerouac's amazement with life bleeds through the page in every description of every character - and there are many of these - in this stream of consciousness chronicle of a few years of his life.