Top 100 Quotes About Jack Kerouac
#1. 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
#2. Around Jack (Kerouac) there circulated a palpable aura of fame and death.
Gary Snyder
#3. Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.
Yann Martel
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.
Jerry Stahl
#8. 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
#9. I just love crazy people like this,' Murphy said. 'Jack Kerouac people. Mad to live, mad to die, that kind of thing.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
#10. 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
#11. Where Eckhart Tolle meets Jack Kerouac meets Buddha. A free consciousness expanding book to kill Ego, sexual boredom & lack of excitement in life.
Gregor Reti
#13. [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
#14. Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
#15. Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
K.M. Soehnlein
#16. He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. "I don't like people who like Jack Kerouac," he clarified.
Michael Finkel
#17. Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves?
Richard Thompson
#18. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Harvey Pekar
#19. Jack Kerouac was cool because he had no idea he was.
Dennis Miller
#20. I realized Jack [Kerouac] was deeply committed to writing. Kesey was just as deeply committed to living and experiencing the lives of others; for him writing was just a part of living.
Sterling Lord
#21. [Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
Anne Waldman
#22. Bill said I was 'developing' at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as a 'reward'. It's On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm now up to about ten cigarettes a day.
Stephen Chbosky
#23. I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.
Anne Waldman
#24. 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
#25. I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.
Jack Kerouac
#27. Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.
Jack Kerouac
#28. 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
#30. Something that you feel will find its own form.
Jack Kerouac
#31. There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.
Jack Kerouac
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.
Jack Kerouac
#37. I see the whole thing popping and parenthesizing in every direction, the story of that house and that kitchen.
Jack Kerouac
#38. I had nothing to offer anybody except for my own confusion
Jack Kerouac
#39. Wishing there was a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.
Jack Kerouac
#40. Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
Jack Kerouac
#41. My eyes were glued on life, and they were full of tears.
Jack Kerouac
#42. Ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you
Jack Kerouac
#43. When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality.
Jack Kerouac
#44. My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack Kerouac
#45. 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
#46. I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, 'Man don't pluck those dirty notes at ME,' and like he just got up without a word and left. [Mardou]
Jack Kerouac
#47. He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.
Jack Kerouac
#48. 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
#49. We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.
Jack Kerouac
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
Jack Kerouac
#53. 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
#54. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
Jack Kerouac
#55. 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
#56. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad street lamp with his thumb stuck out
poor forlorn man, poor lost sometime boy, now broken ghost of the penniless wilds.
Jack Kerouac
#57. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being (195).
Jack Kerouac
#59. The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me
Jack Kerouac
#60. 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
#61. Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot
Jack Kerouac
#62. Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.
Jack Kerouac
#63. My story is endless. I put in a teletype roll, you know, you know what they are, you have them in newspapers, and run it through there and fix the margins and just go, go - just go, go, go.
Jack Kerouac
#64. 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
#65. I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
Jack Kerouac
#66. cliches are truisms and all truisms are true
Jack Kerouac
#67. I was getting drunk and didn't care; everything was fine
Jack Kerouac
#68. I'm the golden eternity in mortal animate form.
Jack Kerouac
#69. All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Jack Kerouac
#70. My shoes are clean from walking in the rain.
Jack Kerouac
#71. It'll take you eternities to get rid of me,' she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I'll never get rid of her - I wanta be chased till eternity till I catch her.
Jack Kerouac
#72. Oh, smell the people! yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. Ah, God! Life!
Jack Kerouac
#74. Buds in the snow
- the deadly fight
between two birds
Jack Kerouac
#76. I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Jack Kerouac
#77. Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?
Jack Kerouac
#78. Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you're going a hundred miles an hour.
Jack Kerouac
#79. I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him
they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
Joyce Johnson
#80. So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.
Jack Kerouac
#81. Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind. But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off.
Jack Kerouac
#82. Nd that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
Jack Kerouac
#83. The unspeakable visions of the individual.
Jack Kerouac
#84. Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.
Jack Kerouac
#85. Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies (214).
Jack Kerouac
#86. 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
#87. So you're leaving, Yo." We called each other Yo.
Jack Kerouac
#88. Hell! I'm glad I did it. It's going to be a change. I
call this life!
Jack Kerouac
#89. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Jack Kerouac
#90. O love, fled me - or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night?
Jack Kerouac
#92. 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
#93. It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.
Jack Kerouac
#94. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).
Jack Kerouac
#95. 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
#96. I looked up at the sky; the pure, wonderful stars were still there, burning
Jack Kerouac
#97. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.
Jack Kerouac
#98. 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
#99. And tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?
Jack Kerouac
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