Fear and Loathing: Part 1

Since I have so many quotes that I want to post from this book, I figured I'd cut it into parts, the way it was written. I'm almost done with it, so Part 2 is coming soon. :D

"'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.' -Dr. Johnson"

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...' and suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals."
That is the best opening to a book that I have ever come across.

"The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. ... Not that we needed all of that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."

"The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into the rotten stuff pretty soon."

"'KILL THE BODY AND THE HEAD WILL DIE' This line appears in my notebook, for some reason."

Circus-Circus
"Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. In this town, they love a drunk. Fresh meat. So they put us through the turnstiles and turned us loose inside."

"'I hate to say this,' said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, 'but this place is getting to me. I think I'm getting the Fear.'"
This scene and the lizard scene are my two favourite scenes in the movie.

Back at the Hotel
"Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they're real. And sweet Jesua, there are a hell of a lot of them--still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino."
I really love the last line of this quote. "I went into the men's room to eat mine

On his first time taking LSD
"I went into the men's room to eat mine. ... [I] spilled the rest on the sleeve of my red Pendelton shirt ... I saw one of the musicians come in. 'What's the trouble,' he said. 'Well,' I said. 'All of this white stuff on my sleeve is LSD.' He said nothing: Merely grabbed my arm and began sucking on it. A very gross tableau. I wondered what would happen if some Kingston Trio/young stockbroker type night wander in and catch us in the act. Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it'll ruin his life--forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendelton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know."

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

That's all for Part 1. I'll do some real reviewing when I finish!