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 KerouacWe 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 KerouacSomething good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that.
Jack KerouacMy aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack KerouacGenius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.
Jack KerouacI 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 KerouacLife must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.
Jack Kerouacgalatea was a serious girl. she was pale and looked like tears all over. big ed passed his hand through his hair and said hello. she looked at him steadily. "where have you been? why did you do this to me?" and she gave dean a dirty look; she knew the score. dean paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food; he asked jane if there was anything. the confusion began right there.
Jack KerouacI realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
Jack KerouacNo man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength
Jack KerouacAs 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 Kerouacand 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 KerouacBut night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moon - laned and I'd go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.
Jack Kerouacand I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.
Jack KerouacBut on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, 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. "Pretty girls make graves," was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico.
Jack KerouacShe talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess.
Jack KerouacMarylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.
Jack KerouacYour mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.
Jack KerouacOffer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
Jack KerouacBut I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
Jack KerouacThe page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
Jack KerouacAh, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy.
Jack KerouacIf critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.
Jack KerouacI petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters.
Jack KerouacIt made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.
Jack KerouacWriting at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.
Jack KerouacDean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
Jack KerouacOne man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
Jack Kerouacmy karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.
Jack Kerouac..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
Jack KerouacContrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days.
Jack Kerouac