Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke's "fictional" account of a journalistic assignment gone terribly wrong, by most standards. Among the accounts of various drug experiences and hallucinations, the narrator and his "attorney" try to find the tangible manifestation of the American Dream. The result is a commentary on the declining counterculture of the '60s, the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, and the culture-at-large. Against the definitively postmodern landscape of the Vegas Strip, Thompson's twisted version of the novelistic hero experiences a paranoid disconnect with American reality, one which may not have needed the aid of psychedelics.

"Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the brain."

"My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate."

"Never lose sight of the primary responsibility."

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas."
"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars."

"Terrible things were happening all around us."

"...you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."

"The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column."

"No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

"One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug..."

"The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel--white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange."

"I live in a quiet place, where any sound at night means something is about to happen: You come awake fast--thinking, what does that mean?"

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

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

"Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless."

"The line between madness and masochism was already hazy; the time had come to pull back...to retire, hunker down, back off and "cop out," as it were. Why not? In every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings--whichever fits."

"This culture has beaten me down."

"How many more nights and weird morning can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples...small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep..."

"Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I'm a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor--however you want to call it, Lord...I'm guilty."

"The sun was hot and I felt like killing something. Anything."

"You better watch yourself, I thought. There are limits to what the human body can endure. You don't want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal."

"I felt like Othello. Here I'd only been in town a few hours, and we'd already laid the groundwork for a classic tragedy. The hero was doomed; he had already sown the seed of his own downfall..."

"Death. I was sure of it. Not even my lungs seemed to be functioning. I needed artificial respiration, but I couldn't open my mouth to say so. I was going to die. Just sitting there on the bed, unable to move...well at least there's no pain. Probably, I'll black out in a few seconds, and after that it won't matter."

"We're looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area..."

"Uppers are going out of style."

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits--a false doorway to the backside of life, a filtyh piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack--Seconal and heroin--and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquilizers. What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up--whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time."

"I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria."