Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.
Jack KerouacI was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
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 KerouacItโs not that I canโt fall in love. Itโs really that I canโt help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I canโt distinguish between whatโs platonic and what isnโt, because itโs all too much and not enough at the same time.
Jack KerouacThe air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
Jack KerouacThinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, itโs all in my mind.
Jack Kerouac