Top 100 Kerouac's Quotes
#1. From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
Christopher Moore
#2. There's a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who's still chasing Kerouac's corpse with a stiletto.
Allen Ginsberg
#3. Capote's rejoinder to Kerouac's assertion that he never needed to edit his work ... But, that's not writing . That's typing.
Truman Capote
#4. You dont have to know a soul to know what I know
to expect what I'm expecting
to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day
When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse
Jack Kerouac
#5. And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.
Jack Kerouac
#6. I've no time
To dally hassel
In your heart's house,
It's too gray
I'm too cold-
I wanta go to Golden,
That's my home.
Jack Kerouac
#7. Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
#8. My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack Kerouac
#9. It's not that I can't fall in love. It's really that I can't help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can't distinguish between what's platonic and what isn't, because it's all too much and not enough at the same time.
Jack Kerouac
#10. Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ...
Jack Kerouac
#11. Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they'll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they WANT- it's MY FATHER MY FATER MY FATHER all over again!
Jack Kerouac
#12. Smith, you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others.' The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.
Jack Kerouac
#13. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
Jack Kerouac
#15. 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
#16. Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?
Jack Kerouac
#17. Hell! I'm glad I did it. It's going to be a change. I
call this life!
Jack Kerouac
#18. It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.
Jack Kerouac
#19. 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
#20. It's pretty amazing to see a guy, while steering at the wheel, suddenly raise his little 300 dollar German camera with one hand and snap something that's on the move in front of him, and through an unwashed windshield at that. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)
Jack Kerouac
#21. For you are an observer, you know, you observe things, that's why you live.
Jack Kerouac
#22. O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that", "how do you know he doesn't hate what He did: He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done tho of course that's not true
Jack Kerouac
#23. And never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
Jack Kerouac
#24. I sat cross-legged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? What's going to happen to me up ahead?
Jack Kerouac
#25. I told you it was kicks. Everybody's kicks, man!
Jack Kerouac
#26. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending.
Lynne Truss
#27. What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?
Jack Kerouac
#28. At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.
Jack Kerouac
#29. I wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.
Jack Kerouac
#30. All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love, really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal ... pride, or what have you ... personal pride or even just personal-ness.
Jack Kerouac
#31. I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.
Jack Kerouac
#33. It's all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.
Jack Kerouac
#34. On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.
Jack Kerouac
#35. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.
Jack Kerouac
#36. Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof, it's August in Big Sur
I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly remember them from long ago
Jack Kerouac
#37. But that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too
Jack Kerouac
#38. I haven't changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I've just got a 12-year-old mentality.When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That's still been a big influence.
David Bowie
#39. I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.
Jack Kerouac
#40. The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.
David Bowie
#41. Life must be rich and full of loving
it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.
Jack Kerouac
#42. Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not "publishing's" -
Jack Kerouac
#43. I loved the way she said 'LA'; I love the way everybody says 'LA' on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done.
Jack Kerouac
#44. You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go.
Jack Kerouac
#45. Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.
Christina Westover
#46. It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.
Ack Kerouac WD
#47. And I saw how everybody dies and nobody's going to care. I felt how it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring.
Jack Kerouac
#48. Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.
Jack Kerouac
#49. We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.
Jack Kerouac
#50. I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.
John Darnielle
#51. 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
#54. Nothing's alive for the universe is a dream already ended.
Jack Kerouac
#55. I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara's ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds.
Jack Kerouac
#56. If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?
Jack Kerouac
#57. The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view
Jack Kerouac
#58. But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off"
The poor drunkard is *crying*
He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help. (p.111)
Jack Kerouac
#59. Dean's California
wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.
Jack Kerouac
#60. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
William S. Burroughs
#61. It's only through form that we can realize emptiness
Jack Kerouac
#62. It's impossible to fall of mountains you fool!
Jack Kerouac
#63. He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.
Jack Kerouac
#64. And nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old
Jack Kerouac
#65. But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility.
Jack Kerouac
#66. The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.
Allen Ginsberg
#67. The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.
Gloria Steinem
#68. I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature.
Jack Kerouac
#69. What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Jack Kerouac
#70. He's a great mysterious Bodhisattva I think maybe a reincarnation of Asagna the great Mahayana scholar of the old centuries." "And who am I?" "I dunno, maybe you're Goat.
Jack Kerouac
#71. Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears ...
Jack Kerouac
#72. It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.
Jack Kerouac
#73. I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can.
Jack Kerouac
#74. Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer ... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
Hunter S. Thompson
#75. My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.
Jack Kerouac
#76. I am not 'I am' but just a spy in somebody's body.
Jack Kerouac
#77. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.
Jack Kerouac
#79. The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame on them and it's all our fault,
Jack Kerouac
#80. On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, 'Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?' and Bull said, 'I like it because it's ugly.
Jack Kerouac
#81. Texas is undeniable ... We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest.
Jack Kerouac
#82. Mainly I've been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I'm writing this, the radio says there's a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.
Jack Kerouac
#83. His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.
Jack Kerouac
#84. What difference does it make after all?
anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.
Jack Kerouac
#85. My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
Jack Kerouac
#86. I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac].
William S. Burroughs
#87. There's nothing wrong with you Ray, your only trouble is you never learned to get out to spots like this, you've let the world drown you in its horseshit and you've been vexed ...
Jack Kerouac
#88. 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
#89. There's a purpose to knowledge ... salvation. What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save something in our souls and make it all beautiful.
Jack Kerouac
#90. The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.
Jack Kerouac
#91. John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'
Jack Kerouac
#92. 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
#93. Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.
Jack Kerouac
#94. [Jack] Kerouac was writing fiction. What he did when he wrote about me ... he made me out with Russian Countesses and Swiss accounts and other things I didn't have or didn't happen and so on.
William S. Burroughs
#95. Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.
Jack Kerouac
#96. Fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt
Jack Kerouac
#97. It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared.
Jack Kerouac
#98. It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.
Jack Kerouac
#99. I go to bed with horror on my wings. In my pillow is sad comforts. Like my mother says, 'On essaye a s'y prendre, pi sa travaille pas' (We try to manage, and it turns out shit).
Jack Kerouac
#100. In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.
Jack Kerouac
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