Top 100 On Kerouac Quotes
#1. I can't think of anybody ... who knows the sum and substance of what I know and feel and cry about in my secret self all the time when I don't feel strong, the sorrows of time and personality, and can therefore on all levels make it all the way with me
Jack Kerouac
#2. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life
Jack Kerouac
#3. 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
#4. And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.
Stephen King
#5. Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
Jack Kerouac
#6. 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
#7. How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)
Jack Kerouac
#8. The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame on them and it's all our fault,
Jack Kerouac
#10. I'd rather walk than ride the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.
Jack Kerouac
#11. 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
#12. The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don't hold back, don't analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.
Jack Kerouac
#13. He was out to get back everything he'd lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever.
Jack Kerouac
#14. Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.
Jack Kerouac
#15. 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
#16. I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.
Jack Kerouac
#17. Not only was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool.
Jack Kerouac
#18. 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
#19. When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
Jack Kerouac
#20. Shared emotions experienced by two souls,empathy on unequivocal level which Davey believed would change entire species of mankind if only secret of empathy could be telepathically shared with humanity,one soul after another, until every soul understood true meaning of love.
Christina Westover
#21. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.
Jack Kerouac
#22. We understood each other on other levels of madness.
Jack Kerouac
#23. The mambo never let up for a moment, it frenzied on like an endless journey in the jungle (288).
Jack Kerouac
#24. 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
#25. It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac
#26. When you feel depressed and you wanta go here, wanta go there, remember Mind Essence; the world, like dreams, will never come true. Operate on Intuition, Rest and Be Happy. It's all in your head what happens so you might as well think happiness.
Jack Kerouac
#27. Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?
Jack Kerouac
#28. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, ========== On the Road (Kerouac, Jack)
Anonymous
#29. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Harvey Pekar
#30. Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.
Jack Kerouac
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.
Jack Kerouac
#34. Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.
Garrett Hedlund
#35. And since I'm well and on the bum again & aint got nothing else to do, but roam, long-faced, the real America, with my unreal heart, here I am eager and ready.
Jack Kerouac
#36. When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Johnny Depp
#37. Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?
Jack Kerouac
#38. 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
#39. All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
Jack Kerouac
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. [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
#45. All around me were the noise of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john.
Jack Kerouac
#46. There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
Jack Kerouac
#47. Now we were on the great Texas plain and, as Dean said, "You drive and drive and you're still in Texas tomorrow night.
Jack Kerouac
#48. Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness ...
Jack Kerouac
#49. But let a perpetual smile
of peace and satisfaction
On your lips
Be a symbol of the decision
To think happiness (equanimity)
Since everything that happens
Happens in your head
Jack Kerouac
#50. At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.
Jack Kerouac
#51. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.
Roger Kimball
#52. 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
#53. All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).
Jack Kerouac
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
Jack Kerouac
#57. 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
#58. All over America highschool and college kids thinking 'Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking' while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded
Jack Kerouac
#59. 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
#60. Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.
Jack Kerouac
#61. 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
#62. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell
Jack Kerouac
#63. I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.
Jack Kerouac
#64. Unable to forgive his own sins, unsatisfied with just the goodness of his heart, [Kerouac] would go on poisoning his body until it rotted around him, rotted, bloated, exploded, and fell away to let the pure Jack Kerouac, the saint, escape free at last - remembered only as a ghost.
Gerald Nicosia
#65. In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.
Jack Kerouac
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country ...
Jack Kerouac
#70. O Rosey,
why don't you stay just home
and eat chocolate bars
and read Boswell
all this society-izing will bring you nothing but lines of anxiety on your face
and a sociable smile ain't nothing but teeth
Jack Kerouac
#71. I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily - all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.'
Jack Kerouac
#72. My eyes were glued on life, and they were full of tears.
Jack Kerouac
#73. 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
#74. I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.
Jack Kerouac
#75. Listen closely ... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
Jack Kerouac
#76. Pound it out, get it done, write every day. No excuses. Kerouac said you can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. Damn straight. You'll sleep a lot better getting your word count in than another quick Twitter check or keeping up to date on the Kardashians.
Dan Alatorre
#77. Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don't dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they're angels.
Jack Kerouac
#78. Before they did all those shows on Jackson Pollock, I loved the way he formulated his paintings. I loved Basquiat - I was into the whole Beat generation, Kerouac, etc., and all those artists talked about that and Kerouac, so I just got in the middle of being spontaneous.
Matt Schulze
#79. A choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night.
Jack Kerouac
#80. 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
#81. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.
Jack Kerouac
#82. Does this mean that frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?
Jack Kerouac
#83. When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.
Jack Kerouac
#84. 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
#86. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.
Jack Kerouac
#87. As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.
Jack Kerouac
#88. We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.
Jack Kerouac
#89. One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away.
Jack Kerouac
#91. You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.
Jack Kerouac
#92. All day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head
Jack Kerouac
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning?
I did.
Jack Kerouac
#97. February dawn
frost on the path Where I paced all winter.
Jack Kerouac
#98. 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
#99. Because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)
Jack Kerouac
#100. 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
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