“Get your kicks on Route 66”
– written by Bobby Troup, recorded by Nat King Cole, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones
“66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“I got them 66 Highway blues”
– written by Woody Guthrie, also recorded by Pete Seeger
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Sometimes there’s a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I’ve ever seen anywhere else”
– Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly’s Route 66: The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip
“The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way”
– Michael Zadoorian, novelist, The Leisure Seeker
“Get your motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure in whatever comes our way”
– Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild
“The spirit of Route 66 is in the details: every scratch on a fender, every curl of paint on a weathered billboard, every blade of grass growing up through a cracked street”
– John Lasseter, director of Cars
“This highway, if you just think about it, is peppered with hope; it is peppered with tears”
– Angel Delgadio, co-founder of Arizona Route 66 Historical Association
“66 is the mother road, the road of flight.[81]”
– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Route 66, 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, opened in 1926
