Jack Kerouac Quotes

But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

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.

The only truth is music.

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.

It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.

listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

I felt free and therefore I was free.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.

stick at it like a benni addict

Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

cliches are truisms and all truisms are true

The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.

There are worse things than being mad.

Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)

I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??

Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.

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.

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.

Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH.

Eager for bread and love.

...and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you

His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.

Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

The taste of rain -- Why kneel?

Rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything

In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.

It's all too much and not enough at the same time.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

Thinking 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, it’s all in my mind.

all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

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.

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.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk

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.

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?