Jack Kerouac Quotes

I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ... ~ Jack Kerouac

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

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night. ~ Jack Kerouac

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach and which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the Angels dove off and flew into infinity. ~ Jack Kerouac

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. ~ Jack Kerouac

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. ~ Jack Kerouac

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal. ~ Jack Kerouac

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved. ~ Jack Kerouac

Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world. ~ Jack Kerouac

And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco. ~ Jack Kerouac

Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. ~ Jack Kerouac

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve. ~ William S. Burroughs

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him. ~ Jack Kerouac

I dunno, maybe you're Goat. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

I felt free and therefore I was free. ~ Jack Kerouac

Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene ― colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. 'All these people,' said Japhy, 'they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.' He had a million ideas, he had 'em all. ~ Jack Kerouac

In our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever ... listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, It is all one vast awakened thing. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. ~ Jack Kerouac

Walking on water wasn't built in a day. ~ Jack Kerouac

The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity. ~ Jack Kerouac

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. ~ Jack Kerouac

It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow ~ Jack Kerouac

One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right - lambies all over the world. ~ Jack Kerouac

Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.' You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is 'success', the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit. ~ Jack Kerouac

I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys talking to farmers and their children. ~ Jack Kerouac

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls. ~ Jack Kerouac

Wearing Deni's huge vicuna coat with the si cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dali.
He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a little wax moustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said 'One grapefruit...peenk!' and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real or Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Uccello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didn't even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the 'insurgent' 'beats' and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, 'He is more beautiful than M. Brando.'
I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn't stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we can't stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful. ~ Jack Kerouac

Bein Crazy
is the least of my worries. ~ Jack Kerouac

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything ... he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys. ~ Jack Kerouac Atop An Underwood Early Stories And Other Writings

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

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what's coming next except that you're burning the road to outrun it. ~ Jack Kerouac

They'll eat your heart alive Every time. ~ Jack Kerouac

Terplash, & what difference make! One little white spark of light! Hair woven hands Penelope seaboat smeller

Is Virgin you trying to fathom me Tiresome old sea, aint you sick & tired of all of this merde? this incessant boom boom & sand walk ~ Jack Kerouac

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)... well, there's more of that up later. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just 'talents.' Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar. ~ Jack Kerouac

There is no way to put a subterranean down on the floor or for that matter put em down at all, they are the most unputdownable in this world and new culture. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantuan preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies. ~ Jack Kerouac

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence. ~ Jack Kerouac

Nothing ever happened - Not even this ~ Jack Kerouac

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars... ~ Jack Kerouac

The tale that's told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that's told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect. ~ Jack Kerouac

Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh. ~ Jack Kerouac

Down in Denver, all I did was die. ~ Jack Kerouac

After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road. ~ William S. Burroughs

Ere so sober Emily/ Did New England sow/ With brooms of activity/ I'd the tree-rock spoken to. ~ Jack Kerouac

The Chinese call it woo
The French les brumes
The British
Fog
L A
Smog
Heaven
Cellar Door ~ Jack Kerouac

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June
Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers
they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. ~ Jack Kerouac

But I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. ~ Jack Kerouac

I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work. ~ Jack Kerouac

Sixty three sunsets I saw revolve on that perpendicular hill – mad raging sunsets pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags like the crags you grayly drew in pencil as a child, with every rose-tint of hope beyond, making you feel just like them, brilliant and bleak beyond words. – ~ Jack Kerouac

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you'd be scared and couldn't comprehend and you'd despair so much you'd drop dead,' that's what he just about said in one of those sutras
~ Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Be in love with your life. Every minute of it. ~ Jack Kerouac

You'd never care to plant some roots in
society, I suppose, mused the other. ~ Jack Kerouac

I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream ~ Jack Kerouac

When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text. ~ Tony D'Souza

We stood under a roadlamp, thumbing, when suddenly cars full of young kids roared by with streamers flying. 'Yaah! Yaah! we won! we won!' they all shouted. Then they yoohooed us and got great glee out of seeing a guy and a girl on the road. Dozens of such cars passed, full of young faces and 'throaty young voices,' as the saying goes. I hated every one of them. Who did they think they were, yaahing at somebody on the road just because they were little high-school punks and their parents carved the roast beef on Sunday afternoons? Who did they think they were, making fun of a girl reduced to poor circumstances with a man who wanted to belove? ~ Jack Kerouac

God is an Indian giver who gives only occasionally. ~ Jack Kerouac

We agreed to love each other madly. ~ Jack Kerouac

-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity ... ~ Jack Kerouac

They never asked, I kept offering. ~ Jack Kerouac

I've got my full rucksack pack and it's spring, I'm going to go Southwest to the dry land, to the long lone land of Texas and Chihuahua and the gay streets of Mexico night, music coming out of doors, girls, wine, weed, wild hats, viva! What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light. ~ Jack Kerouac

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301). ~ Jack Kerouac

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

What's Your Road, Man? ~ Jack Kerouac

You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

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

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars. ~ Jack Kerouac

Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation. ~ Jack Kerouac

I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

If you own a rug you own too much. ~ Jack Kerouac

Eager for bread and love. ~ Jack Kerouac

All day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head ~ Jack Kerouac

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

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes. ~ Jack Kerouac

Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?"
Day mumbled something that sounded like
"Ancient History of the Near East and Greece."
"Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,
"Come with me and see the Near East. ~ Jack Kerouac

Who doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan? ~ Jack Kerouac

Those who're good stay in Heaven,they've been in Heaven from the beginning ~ Jack Kerouac

Rocks are space, and space is illusion. ~ Jack Kerouac

It's impossible to fall of mountains you fool! ~ Jack Kerouac

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

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

And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you: it's with your six sense that you're fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn't for your eyes, you wouldn't see me. If it wasn't for your ears, you wouldn't hear that airplane. If it wasn't for your nose, you wouldn't smell that midnight mint. If it wasn't for your tongue taster, you wouldn't taste the difference between A and B. If it wasn't for your body, you wouldn't feel Princess. There is no me, no airplane, no mind, no Princess, no nothing, you for krissakes do you want to go on being fooled every damn minute of your life? ~ Jack Kerouac

[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

Don't drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life. ~ Jack Kerouac