Top 100 Jack Kerouac Quotes
#2. I wished Dean and Carlo were there - then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The
Jack Kerouac
#3. I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters.
Jack Kerouac
#4. Oh, smell the people! yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. Ah, God! Life!
Jack Kerouac
#5. Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?
Jack Kerouac
#6. Nd that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
Jack Kerouac
#7. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?
Jack Kerouac
#8. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Jack Kerouac
#9. In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.
Jack Kerouac
#10. The innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told
wide eyed hugging in heaven together
hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room
the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill.
Jack Kerouac
#11. The inside of the cabin with the fire finally going is still the dear lovable abode now as sharp in my mind as I look at it as an unusually well focused snapshot
The sprig of ferns still stands in a glass of water, the books are there, the neat groceries ranged along the wall shelves
Jack Kerouac
#12. For you are an observer, you know, you observe things, that's why you live.
Jack Kerouac
#13. Maybe that bird that floats
hill belly on the wind up there,
and that cat
that pats
in this grass,
is the same
Infinite
Worldwide
Angel
Jack Kerouac
#14. I bless you, all living things, I bless you in the endless past, I bless you in the endless present, I bless you in the endless future, amen.
Jack Kerouac
#15. You guys are going somewhere or just going?
Jack Kerouac
#16. All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on.
Jack Kerouac
#17. Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.
Jack Kerouac
#18. So long and take it easy, because if you start taking things seriously, it is the end of you.
Jack Kerouac
#19. I could have made my whole life like that morning just on the strength of pure understanding and willingness to live and go along, God it was all the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in its own way - but it was all sinister.
Jack Kerouac
#20. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Jack Kerouac
#21. What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.
Jack Kerouac
#22. We are nothing.
- Tomorrow we may be die.
We are nothing.
- You and me.
Jack Kerouac
#23. Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.
Jack Kerouac
#24. Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour ... this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?
Jack Kerouac
#25. My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love.
Jack Kerouac
#27. Praised be I, writing, dead already and
dead again
Jack Kerouac
#28. God is an Indian giver who gives only occasionally.
Jack Kerouac
#29. Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac
#30. We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.
Jack Kerouac
#33. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.
Jack Kerouac
#34. Papier-mache canals flowed in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect the drizzle hopelessness of 1926.
Jack Kerouac
#35. Will you love me in December as you do in May?
Jack Kerouac
#36. I saw letters he wrote at age 14 before his recent spell of silence: they were perfectly normal and better than average writings, in fact sensitive and better than anything I could have written at 14 when I also was an innocent introverted monster.
Jack Kerouac
#37. I clearly saw the skeleton underneath
all this show of personality
what is left of a man
and all his pride but bones?
Jack Kerouac
#38. I'd rather die than be famous,
I want to go live in the desert
With long wild hair, eating
At my campfire, full of sand
Jack Kerouac
#39. Every night I still ask the Lord, "Why?" and havent heard a decent answer yet
Jack Kerouac
#40. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He
Jack Kerouac
#41. Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
Jack Kerouac
#42. I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac
#43. After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
Jack Kerouac
#45. The great black bird broods outside my window in the high dark night waiting to enfold me when I leave the house tomorrow only I'm going to dodge it successfully by sheer animalism and ability and even exhilaration, so goodnight
Jack Kerouac
#46. The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.
Jack Kerouac
#47. Everything belongs to me because I am poor.
Jack Kerouac
#48. And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
Jack Kerouac
#49. We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I'd been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another,
Jack Kerouac
#50. I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.
Jack Kerouac
#51. I'd rather walk than ride the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.
Jack Kerouac
#52. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!
Jack Kerouac
#53. Of course world travel isn't as good as it seems, it's only after you've come back from all the heat and horror that you forget to get bugged and remember the weird scenes you saw
Jack Kerouac
#54. I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.
Jack Kerouac
#55. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.
Jack Kerouac
#56. Where is he tonight? Where am I? Where are you?
Jack Kerouac
#57. Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness ...
Jack Kerouac
#58. An art dies when it describes itself instead of life - when it turns from the expression of man's feelings in the void, to a mere description of the void.
Jack Kerouac
#59. In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age.
Jack Kerouac
#60. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.
Jack Kerouac
#61. Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac
#63. It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.
Jack Kerouac
#64. The beauty of things must be that they end.
Jack Kerouac
#65. My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.
Jack Kerouac
#66. But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges.
Jack Kerouac
#68. I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time
all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.
Jack Kerouac
#69. If he can be call'd meek
who has no wishes
or hiding who needs never
be found
or scared who never
attacks
forgotten, who watches up
the night
If he can be called "he,"
who has no self
Writes "One is All"
On every wall.
Jack Kerouac
#70. Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?
Jack Kerouac
#71. He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less...He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become; but like any Angel he still had rages and furies...
Jack Kerouac
#72. And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.
Jack Kerouac
#73. Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and 'kitchen machinery' he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums.
Jack Kerouac
#74. What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want? She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.
Jack Kerouac
#75. The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.
Jack Kerouac
#76. [the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all ... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.
Jack Kerouac
#77. I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
Jack Kerouac
#78. Everything is all right forever and forever and forever.
Jack Kerouac
#79. This is the beginning and the end of the world right here. Look at those patient Buddhas lookin at us saying nothing.
Jack Kerouac
#80. All that hitchhikin
All that railroadin
All that comin back
to America
Jack Kerouac
#81. The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
Jack Kerouac
#82. Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.
Jack Kerouac
#83. I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?
Jack Kerouac
#84. And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.
Jack Kerouac
#86. O sweetheart and okay
Here's hopin we'll all be away
It was great fun
But it was just one a
those tings
Jack Kerouac
#87. And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.
Jack Kerouac
#88. The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.
Jack Kerouac
#89. Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.
Jack Kerouac
#90. The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
Jack Kerouac
#91. We all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.
Jack Kerouac
#92. He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.
Jack Kerouac
#93. They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.
Jack Kerouac
#94. New York gets god awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets.
Jack Kerouac
#95. I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living', I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
Jack Kerouac
#96. Now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind - for
Jack Kerouac
#97. I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac
#98. I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us
Jack Kerouac
#99. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
Jack Kerouac
#100. Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.
Jack Kerouac
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